Famous film art director Ms. Huang Mei-Ching recently gave a talk at TNUA on the film “Paradise in Service,” for which she has been nominated for Best Art Direction of this year’s Golden Horse Award.
“Paradise in Service” adds to a list of popular and critically-acclaimed films for which Ms. Huang has won awards and nominations for awards for art direction at major film festivals in Taiwan and other countries in recent years, including “Monga,” “Au Revoir Taipei” and “Love.”
She spent three months doing extensive research for the latest film, which is set in a military brothel, codenamed “831 Teahouse,” on Kinmen between 1969 and 1971 when the remote island was on the frontline of Taiwan in a war against mainland China.
As official records were hard to come by because of military restrictions, Ms. Huang mostly relied on accounts of local people to reconstruct the brothel and the main street of the area.
She said everything she saw during her field research on Kinmen reflected how robust life once was there.
Ms. Huang said the art design for the film required a lot of attention to details. For example, even the camouflaged uniforms of the soldiers were different from area to area on the island, and all such details had to be carefully re-created in order to produce an authentic picture of the time.