Father
Director : YANG Li-chou  Year : 2017  Color : Color  Running Time : 100 min 
CHEN Hsi-huang is the eldest son of LI Tien-lu, the renowned Taiwanese glove puppeteer, but his relationship with his father had always been strained. At the age of 79, CHEN set up his own troupe, which soon earned recognition all over the world. Nevertheless, CHEN finds no one to pass on his great skills…

“The Puppetmaster”  is a 1993 Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Based on the memoirs of Li Tian-lu, Taiwan’s most celebrated puppeteer, this story covers the years from Li’s birth in 1909 to the end of Japan’s fifty-year occupation of Taiwan in 1945.

“This epic chamber-piece, which split the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993, is neither documentary nor fiction. (The Chinese title is “Drama, Dream, Life.”) The movie dramatizes the youth and early career of Taiwanese “national treasure” Li Tien-lu who, born in 1910, became an apprentice puppeteer at age eight, performing traditional plays first in remote mountain villages and later for Japanese officials in Tapei. During the war these shows became morale-building propaganda, dramatizing combat against American forces, complete with puppet airplanes and smoky special effects. Even in peacetime, though, Japan was a presence. Li’s story, one of continuous family turmoil, is played out during the fifty-year period during which Taiwan was a Japanese colony, from 1895 to the end of World War II. He is one protagonist and history is the other.” > from this review

戏梦人生 > Xì mèng rénshēng > Dream Life

more about Li-Tien Lu > here