"Sedek Bale" is a peak of Chinese cinema. 这部史诗巨作改编自真实的历史事件：雾社事变，诠释了一种震撼人心的精神力量。 "Xiaobian" has watched this movie many times, and every time I feel passionate and blood boiling! What makes this film enduring is the spiritual world of the touched and fascinating Sidek people behind the grand, spectacular narrative.
Whatever your position, the courage and fortitude of the Sidek people in order to defend the dignity of life, and the choice to live to the death in order to uphold their faith are enough to win our respect!
The spiritual world of the Sidek people
In the spirit of the Sideks, there are two worlds, one is the world in which they now live (this shore world) and the other is the world in which their ancestral spirits live (the other shore world). There is a fat hunting ground in the other world, where it is quiet, peaceful and an eternal paradise. Connecting the two worlds is a rainbow bridge.
When a Sidek man dies, his soul has to cross the Rainbow Bridge to reach the other side of the world. Guarding the bridge is the ancestral spirit of the Sideks, and whenever a soul wants to cross the bridge, the ancestral spirit will ask him to stretch out his hands to check it out. A man who has blood on his hands that cannot be rubbed proves that he once fought to protect his tribe and is a warrior who can guard his clan; if a woman has a cocoon on her hand, it means that she has woven armor for the warriors of the tribe, and is a hard-working Sidek woman. Seeing such men and women, zuling will gladly let them cross the rainbow bridge and enter the world of zuling, that is, the eternal other world, and live a happy and happy life. If a man has no blood on his hands and no cocoons on a woman's hands, they cannot cross the Rainbow Bridge and thus become homeless ghosts. This is the most feared thing for the Saidek people.
In this sense, the Kirisame Incident, the incident in the film in which the Sedeks "came out of the grass" of the Japanese, was not only a struggle between the aborigines and colonists for territory, but also a battle of faith against the invaders in order to qualify for the passage of the Rainbow Bridge. Only by looking at it from this perspective can we fully understand the touching deeds of those characters in history and movies.
Disappearing hunting grounds
In 1894, the Qing government was defeated in the Sino-Japanese War. In 1895, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Maguan with Japan, which humiliated the country, and "the whole island of Taiwan and all the affiliated islands" were ceded to Japan. After the Japanese occupied Taiwan, they occupied the Sedek people's settlement by force, began to exploit the local mineral and forest resources, and destroyed the hunting grounds on which the Saidek people had lived for generations. 而猎场是赛德克人之所以成其为赛德克人的主要标志。 “再20年就不是赛德克！ 就没有猎场！ ”（莫那那鲁道语）
In the process, Sidek's men became cheap laborers for the laborers, while the women were reduced to slaves to the miscellaneous servants and lived a life without dignity. More seriously, these young people were not qualified to put a totem in their faces because they were not fighting for the guardian tribes, and thus disqualified from crossing the Rainbow Bridge.
The hunting grounds of this world are disappearing, the hunting grounds on the other side are unreachable, their souls are destined to have nowhere to rest, and they are destined to become lone ghosts after death, and this fear and anxiety deeply trouble the young Sidek people. For the old Sideks like Morudao, they could not forget the bloody hatred of the Japanese slaughtering their people, and they could not bear the humiliation of the Japanese enslaving their children and grandchildren, and they also believed that since there was no hunting ground in this world, it was better to take these young souls across the Rainbow Bridge and meet with the ancestral spirits in the eternal and beautiful hunting ground on the other side. In this context, giving up life on this shore and thus getting the opportunity to reach the other shore has become the consensus of the Side Warriors.
A battle to save the soul
Understanding the spiritual world of the Saidek people and understanding the situation of the Sideks at that time, it is easy to understand that the outbreak of the Wushe Uprising actually has historical inevitability. This uprising, which is essentially a battle for the souls of the Saideks, is to "be martyred to heaven and sing to death." In the uprising, what they lost was their own body, but what they won was their own soul.
In this sense, this is not a war movie, it has nothing to do with the nation, it has nothing to do with the country. 它向我们讲述的是一个赛德克人拯救灵魂的故事！
Born I desire more than the living, so I will not be gained; and I am evil to death, and I am more evil than the dead, so I suffer from what I do not do.