The Making of Crime Scenes
# Short Film Collage 1 - Re-making History and Memory
The Making of Crime Scenes
Language: Chinese
Subtitle: English
22/10, 20:00-21:30
Sinema Transtopia
HSU Che-Yu, France 2022, 22 min.
German Premiere
Starting from a gunman involved in a murder case, I seek to reflect the collective unconscious
within society and politics through the gunman's multiple peculiar roles—a filmmaker, a killer, a
gangster, and a patriot.
In 1984, when Taiwan was still under Martial Law, a Taiwanese American writer Henry Liu was
shot to death in his own house in the US by a Taiwanese assassin. Afterward, due to the intervention and investigation of the US government authorities, this case was eventually confirmed to be a political murder jointly committed by the Military Intelligence Bureau and the
biggest mafia United Bamboo Gang in Taiwan, as the government paid the mafia to kill Henry Liu.
The protagonist of this work, Wu Dun, is the assassin who fired the shot at the time. After the
case was exposed, the Taiwanese authorities were pressured by the US, and Wu Dun was thus
sentenced to life imprisonment. However, he was given amnesty and discharged from prison
after six years. After he got out of prison, Wu Dun remained an important member of the United
Bamboo Gang, and he established a film company as a producer with the support of his mafia
influence, making several “wuxia films” – refers to specific traditional Chinese swordplay films.
In this work, I revisited the film studio that was once used by Wu Dun and is now deserted to
recompose the fragments of the political assassination and the scenes of wuxia films, and I
cooperated with a 3D scanning team—their job is to provide forensic scanning service at
crime scenes—to make a digital double of Wu Dun.
Director’s Bibliography:
Hsu Che-Yu (b. 1985) is an artist based in Taipei and Amsterdam. Since 2019, he had
participated in the residency program in HISK (Ghent, 2019–2020) and Le Fresnoy – Studio
national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, 2020–2022). In 2022, he begins his two-year art
residency in Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Hsu Che-Yu works as an artist who primarily creates
animations, videos, and installations that feature the relations between media and memories.
What matters to the artist is not simply the history of events traceable through media, but also
the construction and visualization of memories, be they private or collective.
Festivals / Awards:
- Best Experimental Film, Taiwan Golden Harvest Awards 2022
- Taiwan Film Critics Society Prize & The Merit Prize of Taiwan Competition, Taiwan
- International Documentary Festival 2022
- Videoex Experimental Film & Video Festival 2023
- IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022
- Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022
- Go Short - International Short Film Festival Nijmegen 2022