Stone Dream

In 1965, the Chinese farmer Liu was the chief figure in a documentary by Chen Yao-Chi. He was one of the dedicated ex-soldiers who cultivated the rock-strewn banks of the Mukua River in Taiwan. As a young man, Liu was forced to join the army, and under Chiang Kai-shek's regime he ended up in Taiwan. Now, many decades later, he is filmed again, after the director Hu Tai-Li had coincidentally recognised him as the hard worker in Chen’s film. STONE DREAM records the daily life of Liu and his family and, by means of interviews with the protagonist and his neighbours, describes the complex ethnic relationships in Taiwan, where many Chinese live who have started families with native Taiwanese. The stones from the title are the rocks from the river that sometimes, in their polished form, display beautiful landscapes, as a symbol of inner beauty. When his wife dies, the now elderly Liu wants to return to his fatherland, but at the same time he realises that he will no longer feel at home there. He has become too strongly attached to his new fatherland Taiwan, where his son and grandson were born.