No puedo vivir sin ti

Taiwanese director Leon Dai gave his 2009 movie a Spanish title for overseas markets, maybe on the assumption that international audiences would be attracted better by the romantic No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti than the prosaic Cannot Live Without You.

That year's Golden Horse Film Festival jurors weren't bothered either way, choosing the movie for Best Film, Best Director and Outstanding Taiwanese Film of the Year awards. It also won the Best Screenplay accolade for Dai and co-writer (and lead actor) Chen Wen-pin.

A deliberately simple, under-stated and stark B&W tale of a simple, poor and uneducated single father and his 7-year-old daughter, the docudrama was based on a real-life incident. The desperate man perched on a high bridge in Taipei, threatening to throw himself and the child off in protest at society's unfairness.

An underwater mechanic and day labourer in the Kaohsiung docks, fell between the cracks in a well-meaning bureaucratic society. In order to register his daughter for school, he needed to be her registered father. He wasn't, and a succession of gently Kafkaesque encounters in various government offices in Kaohsiung and Taipei led to increasing despair. Only one friend, a fellow Hakka schoolmate, could try to help, before the failed suicide and after the man's return from prison to Kaohsiung's docks. The daughter had been taken into state care and placed with unknown foster families.

The credibility of the ending can be disputed, but everything before it is a cinematic delight, beautifully photographed in B&W, shadow and light, showcasing Kaohsiung's harbour with a clarity that evokes the best of Italian neo-realism. Lead actor Chen is totally convincing as a loving father without guile, and Dai's direction and editing meticulously present bureaucrats not as villains but understanding guardians (and prisoners) of legal processes.

Every now and then, details (such as a sidewalk beggar and protest banners) seem designed to arouse, almost subliminally, an audience's consciousness of actual unfairness and hypocrisy in Taiwanese society. Dai, a movie actor since 1997, achieves much within his short (85-minute) second feature (after the very different, very sexy Twenty Something Taipei in 2002). Chen, the co-creator, is a total newcomer. Both are worth watching in the future.