I don’t have a big story to go along with these few images. It was just a nice Sunday afternoon concert and a movie. The concert took place at Zhongshan Hall here in Taipei. I wrote a bit about that beautiful and historic hall here.

The concert was put on by the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra Chorus. The concert was called Say “I Do” in Year 100. The idea behind the concert was to celebrate love. They had invited any couples who had been married for 50 years or more to come and tell their stories.

Six couples – dressed up in their absolute best – came on stage and told their stories between performances by the orchestra. Pictures of their life together and pictures of their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren were shown on two large screens on either side of the stage. At the end, their children and grandchildren came on stage and presented them with bouquets.

The music was chosen to suit the theme and the time of year and ranged from Bizet to Bach and featured famous pieces such as Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Greensleeves and Pachelbel’s Canon.

It was a relatively short concert, and that gave me enough time to pop into the MRT and make it to the Spot Taipei Film House for a screening of the Colombian film The Wind Journeys. It was shown as part of the ongoing Latin American Film Festival “To the Other Side.”

It could have been that it was Christmas Day or that this film was featured on the cover of the film festival’s program, but it was a popular movie. A large crowd was waiting to get in, but I still managed to get a ticket. Someone had not been able to make it, and their friend was selling their ticket for the member’s price of NT$150. Technically, I guess, that means I bought the ticket from a scalper. The endearing thing was that the clerk at the official ticket counter had actually brokered the deal.

I wouldn’t say that it was my favorite film at the festival so far. It was very slow and somewhat abstract in the style of Latin American magic realism. That type of movie doesn’t give me much to identify with. Still, it was enjoyable and very thought provoking, and – in retrospect – very funny. It was the story of a quest in the tradition of Don Quixote. The difference was that Don Quixote was not a knight errant but a legendary accordion player named Ignacio. Ignacio had spent a lifetime as a traveling musician in the Colombia of the 1950s and 1960s. His Rocinante for the journey was a perky little donkey – a “burrito” – and his lance was an accordion. Our hero goes questing all over the mountains and jungles and villages and fields of Colombia to return his accordion to its rightful owner. The accordion has two large black horns sticking out of it and was supposed to have belonged to the devil. Sancho in this movie is a teenage boy named Fermin who wishes to learn to play the accordion. Ignacio and Fermin have all kinds of strange adventures along the way – adventures in which the accordion player is akin to a gunslinger from the old west. There is even an extended sequence where accordion players duel for a prize. I said it wasn’t my favorite film from the festival, but it has really stuck with me. I’ve watched the trailer a few times now on YouTube, and it makes me smile each time.

There are a few movies left in the festival that I want to see, most of them set in modern Latin America. The next will probably be a movie called Bolivia, which is playing this Wednesday night.

 

Tags: Colombia, Don Quixote, His Rocinante, Latin America, Latin American, Taipei, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, Taipei Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Taiwan, The Wind Journeys