The Japanese director closely followed two families in Northern Thailand for over three years. Despite being infected with HIV, these families look ahead to their future with their foot planted firmly on the ground.

In Zhiou, a village of the Mihu tribe of the indigenous Tayal peoples in Heping Township, Taichung County, the poet and primary school teacher Walis Nogang establishes temporary housing after the earthquake. Based on ideas of traditional, cooperative living, the project aims for independent self-recovery, but discord grows as differences of opinion with elders surface and the outside attention drawn only to the housing development creates a sense of unfairness among the villagers. While the darker side of humanity is brought into stark relief under the severe conditions following the devastating earthquake, the bright and cheerful voice of the pirate radio station Radio Mihu frames the film, conveying a sense of human strength and hope for the future.

Director Hsiao Chu-chen points her camera at her father, a retired soldier. In 1949, the Nationalist government retreated from mainland China to Taiwan with 600,000 soldiers. In his twenties at the time, Hsiao’s father believed as did many others they would soon return to China with the Nationalist government. But it took forty years for relations across the straits to be re-established, and it was futile even to dream of returning home. Hsiao uses an ornamental hairpin that belonged to her grandmother left behind on the mainland as the key to her father’s world, bringing forth his feelings towards the China of that era and the remembrances of other retired soldiers.

This film documents the events in Three Fork Village, a small village of the Tayal tribe who migrated fifty years ago from Mihu. After the earthquake forced the entire village to relocate, the villagers encounter a succession of ups and downs in the process of reconstructing their homes. As a typhoon causes further water damage, the camera not only follows the reconstruction efforts of the villagers, but it also questions the essence of the problems that have hindered reconstruction in the five years since the disaster.