The Great Buddha+

Director: Huang Hsin-yao

2017 / 102min / DCP

Huang’s debut feature, winner of the top prize at the 19th Taipei Film Festival and one of Lee’s favorite works of recent Taiwanese cinema, is a crafty, pitch-black comedy of underclass resourcefulness, resentfulness, and envy about a security guard, Pickle (documentarian Cres Chuang), who works at a factory that produces statues of the Buddha. Discovering of a trove of dashboard camera videos documenting the womanizing factory owner’s sleazy secret life one night, Pickle, with his lone pal, Belly Button (Bamboo Chen), a scavenger who ekes out a living collecting recyclables, finds himself initiated into the unsavory hidden world of the unscrupulous superrich. A brilliant film about the haves and have-nots, shot in color and black and white by filmmaker Chung Mong-hong, with Huang himself providing a hysterically vulgar running commentary to the action.