Rage against the dying light: The Man Who Couldn't Leave

“After you finish watching, I hope you spread the word.” The directness of this statement, this call to action, from A-Kuen, the narrator of Chen Singing’s The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, is unmistakable. His gaze addresses us as spectators, as spectres of a future resistance. While the several lives of prisoners in the Green Island prison during the reign of Taiwan’s White Terror, ended in incarceration, suffering and death, their stories of resistance could leave the prison walls unlike them. In the 35-minute film, with its recollection unfolding in epistolary moments, hope and survival is enclosed in the long shirt that hid the letter in its seams. The continuance of narratives and the spirit of resistance is passed onto us.

Chen’s film utilizes the mode of virtual reality as its own entrapment. While at first we seem to observe things from a relative distance, she lets us inside the simulated cramped prison cell with the inmates, breathing the same stale air of hopelessness and restlessness. There is a semblance of paranoia as we turn our heads looking as well for escape or even just a room to breathe, afraid that violence could claim our lives too. While I felt a conflicting sense of beauty from its pictorial quality, i.e. light illuminating hanging bodies like ornaments in the dark amid the bleakness of its subject, terror does pass through the prism of beauty as it transcends toward art. Chen’s use of wax figures albeit much smaller in size, also calls to mind Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, another documentary that memorializes the impact of authoritarian regimes to the nation and its people.

Being the last show/film for the entire #TaiwanWeek2025, Chen’s film, much like the narratives of the theater performances, point towards the continuance of time, looping back to Chou’s VR short In The Mist. It also branches towards Cinderfella, with its similar tale of repression and violence, and reaches for the same release and resistance, as with the poet Dylan Thomas’ famous words that closed the play Journey into the Apocalypse. Chen’s film is a crucial highlight and element of the tour along the White Terror Memorial housed under Taiwan’s Human Rights Education Center, which is also credited as film’s producer. The institution’s existence in the middle of New Taipei City cannot be more poignant—history resisting itself from the sound and fury of construction that surrounds the estate.

The ArtsEquator Fellowship Critics Network is made possible with the support of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia.