Taiwanese writer/director Wei Te-Sheng, who brings us this film directed in local Seediq language, was recently interviewed in Hollywood Reporter: Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale is Taiwan‘s biggest production ever ($25 million) and is hope for the foreign-language Oscar race.

The action drama is based on a true story that took place in the Aboriginal Seediq community in 1930, when Seediq clans, led by charismatic leader Mouna Rudo, rebelled against the Japanese colonial forces and ended up slaughtering them in savage brutality.

Warriors of the Rainbow is about indigenous populations fighting invadors, but has hardly anything to do with Avatar. Nothing here bears good feelings, with baddies on one side and clear heroes on the other. Lines are blurred, and violence is crude on either sides.

“What is special about the film though is that there is no definite bad guy and good guy. There is always a bright side in bad guys and a dark side in good people. We tend to tell the story of a perfect hero. There is no struggle. But we want audiences to really feel the [characters’] struggle in this historic event and think about what they would do in their situation.(…) We really want to introduce this very different hero epic to American audiences instead of [films with] the perfect hero”, Wei Te-Sheng says.

The West will be seeing the movie in short version (2:30 instead of the Taiwanese 4:30 version!), unfortunately missing the parts on Seediq traditional culture yet remaining uncompromised as far as language, with characters featured in their own Seediq language.

Wei Te-Sheng is particularly glad that the film’s success in Taiwan has helped bring out the pride in indigenous people: “It is a beautiful scene when they wear their traditional clothes to go to the movies,” he says.

Read article in Hollywood Reporter here, and in Time Out Hong Kong here.