08-07-19

Grave poverty and social injustice are now a threat to human progress and stability everywhere in the world.

Pope Francis said correctly, “Globalization has helped many people rise out of poverty, but it has also damned many others to starve. It is true that wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities have also grown and new poverty arisen. We cannot wait any longer to deal with the structural cases of poverty in order to heal our society from an illness that can only lead to new crises. We need projects, mechanisms and processes to implement better distribution of resources, from the creation of new jobs to the integral promotion of those who are excluded.”

Worst of all, some rich people regard poverty as a shame and being ashamed of it by the poor themselves makes the problem more disturbing.

In many places, violence is seen as a more efficient means than non-violence in redressing the injustice. In fact, violence cannot. Violence drives out peace and stability, the reliable platform on which all sides can talk and solve. We shall not be captured by the moments of emotion and let the society be hijacked by the extremists. It is dangerous to let hate and violence to drive a society to a corner where everyone feels insecure and fearful. We must not expel hopes and talks, and we must affirm the positive value of communication.

Some used to think art is to serve the rich. It is not. Modern artists also have a social conscience. Some want, in order to send a warning signal to the world, to portray poverty and its hardships. The urban poor, jobless, ragged, senile, sick, heartbroken and hopeless are all good objects and topics for an artist. Contemporaries are motivated by the mix of curiosity, compassion, anger and sympathy which drew the artists to presenting the brutal realities of poverty. Our world is changing fast and more high-tech. It however has not done enough for the poor. The expressions and protests against poverty and social injustice through art are far more powerful than physical violence which can bring a society to the edge of a cliff next to the ocean of anarchy.

In recent times, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China Mainland and Hong Kong, the 5 ‘chopsticks-using’ places, all produced an outstanding film related to poverty. Such films received numerous awards in international film festivals and the Japanese and Korean ones got even the crown jewel in Festival de Cannes.

Parasite is a 2019 South Korea dark comedy – drama film directed by Bong Joon-ho. A driver and his wife were unemployed. The two teenager kids had no money to go to college. The family struggled to survive by folding pizza boxes in their semi-basement home. Being desperate, they invented a plot to take advantage of a rich family. Initial ‘parasiting’ on the target family turned out to be successful. The poor became more aggressive with regard to their plan B of sucking up the rich family.

In 2018, Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda made a film called Shoplifters. At first blush, there is nothing irregular about a poor family in Tokyo: there is a man and his wife, a little boy, a sweet girl, an older sister and an old granny, all living in a tumbledown bungalow covered with dust and dirt. It is shocking to discover that the food and necessities of the family were all trophies of their shoplifting. It is even more shocking to later realize that the family relationships were made up in order to cheat the outside world. How could this horrible family carry on when the others started to eye the members with suspicion?

The 2017 Taiwanese film directed by Huang Hsin-yao, The Great Buddha, won more than 20 awards. Pickle was a night security guard at a bronze buddha factory. His friend Belly Button was a scavenger. They were poor and abandoned by the society. Having late night snacks, enjoying porn magazines picked up from trash bins and watching television were their dull daily life. One day when the television did not work, their life was changed completely after they found something to replace the television. That ‘something’ was the beginning of a murder story.

Dying to Survive is a 2018 Chinese film directed by Wen Muye and it is his feature film debut. The film is based on the real-life story of a lower-class businessman who smuggled cheap but unproven cancer medicine from India for the thousands of cancer sufferers in China in 2004. He started out importing the illegal drug to make good money, but he came to feel how much it mattered to his dying customers. His smuggling gang included a weird middle-aged man, a rebellious teenage, a stubborn priest and a pole dance lady who were exhausted by poverty. Money soon shattered their unity and caused the parties an impossible situation.

Finally, it is Hong Kong. Mad World is a 2016 tragedy directed by Wong Chun. Tung, a patient having bipolar disorder, was discharged after serving the sentence of manslaughtering his mother. He was placed in the custody of his truck-driver father who belonged to the ‘working poor’ class. They lived in a tiny and smelly ‘matchbox’ room in dilapidated condition. The neighbours were hostile to such a dangerous intruder and they decided to do nasty things against the poor family.

The above 5 poverty films are artistically sublime and stimulating. They depicted how poverty had become a punishment on the unfortunate for a crime that they did not commit in these Asian cities which look gorgeous from the outside. The 5 films strike a fine balance between artistic and commercial elements. You should not miss such great films. I do not know if poverty is a necessary accompaniment to civilization or not. I do know that without poverty and social injustice, the artists like film directors would not have been able to be inspired by the misery of the sad and poor; and to use their unhappiness to tell how happy some of us are.

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