Beyond Beauty: Taiwan From Above

Chi Po-lin was a civil servant at the National Expressway Engineering Bureau, and part of his job was photographing construction progress from the air. He had been shooting from helicopters since the 1990s, for more than twenty years. After Morakot in 2009, having seen the mountains of southern Taiwan opened up from above, he gave up the three years of service that stood between him and his pension, mortgaged his house, and went to make a film.

Beyond Beauty opened on November 1, 2013. It runs ninety-three minutes and does not contain a single shot taken from the ground. Most of what it shows was already known: the guesthouses covering the hills at Cingjing, the quarry cut into the mountain beside Taroko, the cabbage fields at high altitude, the subsided fish farms of the west coast, river mouths in assorted colors. The difference was the angle. From the ground these are separate local problems. From a thousand meters up they are one face of one island.

It took 220 million NT dollars at the box office, still the record for a Taiwanese documentary, and won best documentary at the Golden Horse Awards that year. The response was faster than anyone expected. While the film was in cinemas, an investigation was under way into wastewater discharged into the Houjin River by ASE's K7 plant in Kaohsiung, and the plant was ordered to halt production in December; at the end of that month the Executive Yuan set up a land conservation task force and made a list of the places the film had named. Factories were inspected. Guesthouses were found to be illegal structures.

There was also a different criticism. The film identified phenomena and not structures — behind the high-altitude cabbage is agricultural policy, behind the quarry a licensing regime, behind the over-pumping of groundwater several decades of industrial dependence. Some argued it let audiences understand responsibility as a moral question rather than an institutional one. The criticism holds, and it takes nothing away from what the film did: it got 2.2 million people to buy a ticket voluntarily and sit in a cinema looking at how wrong the place they live in had gone.

On June 10, 2017, Chi Po-lin was scouting locations for a sequel above Fengbin in Hualien when his helicopter crashed. He died with his producer, Chen Kuan-chi, and the pilot, Chang Chih-kuang. He was fifty-two. The sequel was never made.

The last scene of the film is a group of Bunun children taken up to the summit of Yushan to sing. It is the only shot in the film that looks upward.