Japan-Taiwan Co-Production 'Arrested Memory' Masks Colonial Legacies and Indigenous Erasure in Transnational Film Economy
Original framing: “‘Arrested Memory’ filmmaker Sabu likes to stay on his toes” — The Japan Times
Taiwan's 16 recognized indigenous nations (including Amis, Paiwan, Atayal, Bunun) hold collective rights to traditional territories where films like 'Arrested Memory' likely shot. The Indigenous Peoples Basic Law (2005) mandates Free, Prior, and Informed Consent for development on indigenous lands — a framework entirely absent from co-production agreements negotiated between Japanese producers and Taiwan's central agencies. Sabu's 'arrested memory' concept ironically echoes the KMT's martial law era (1949-1987) suppression of indigenous languages and Japanese colonial ethnography that classified aborigines as 'raw savages.' No indigenous consultant, language coach, or sovereignty protocol is mentioned in the profile — a silence that reproduces the very erasure the film's title might claim to interrogate.
The Japan Times profile of Sabu's 'Arrested Memory' performs a familiar alchemy: it transforms a Japanese director's colonial-era privilege — unfettered access to Taiwanese lands, crews, and subsidies — into 'idiosyncratic artistic agility.
' The eight-dimensional analysis reveals this as structural extraction disguised as cultural exchange. Japan's 1895-1945 colonial film infrastructure, the KMT's martial law suppression of Taiwanese/indigenous memory, and today's Taiwan Creative Content Agency subsidies form a continuous pipeline where Japanese auteur capital extracts Taiwanese locations and labor while centering Japanese authorship. Sabu's trickster energy — genuine in his Japanese context — becomes colonial mimicry in Taiwan, where indigenous Paiwan vecik (ancestral spirit presence) and Han Taiwanese transitional justice demands require not 'staying on toes' but rooted accountability. The solution pathways — FPIC protocols, equity quotas, indigenous memory funds, transparency certification — are not abstract; they are already being built in Canada, Aotearoa, and by Taiwan's own indigenous filmmakers. The profile's framing will collapse when (not if) Taiwan's cultural sovereignty movement makes such extraction impossible. Sabu's film may yet surprise us — but the Japan Times has already arrested its own memory of why that surprise would matter.