THE CLI-FI REPORT

Producer and scriptwriter Wei Te-sheng, holding bat, and director Umin Boya, center with the 1931 team in a photo display behind them during a recent press conference in Taipei in the fall of 2012.

YES THEY 'KANO': When a Chiayi high school baseball team in Japanese-controlled Taiwan in 1931 was invited to Japan to play in the annual Koshien all-Japan tournament,
they reached the finals. A local Kano museum in Chiayi serves as an
unofficial team shrine. Japan held Taiwan island as a colony from 1895 tp 1945.

When Wei Te-sheng, the director of "Cape No. 7" and "Seediq Bale"
heard about a Chiayi high school baseball team from 1931 which
"almost" won the all-Japan Koshien summer tournament in Kobe, he just
knew he had to make a movie about it.

So he wrote a script, signed up
as producer, asked Umin Boya to direct it, raised a pile of money,
hired a cast of Taiwanese actors and extras, and the film, currently
in production in Chiayi and other cities, is set to be released in
early 2014.

The movie's working title is "KANO," the nickname of the old Chiayi
Agricultural and Forestry Vocational High School, which now longer
exists. The nickname comes from the first two English letters of the
two Japanese words "Kagi Norin," with Kagi being the Japanese word for
Chiayi and Nomin being the Japanese words for agriculture and
forestry.

While most people in Chiayi know about the team's exploits in 1931,
few are aware that just a few steps from the modern 15-story
glass-paneled City Hall there is an old one-story Japanese-era
building, hidden behind a long cement wall, that serves as an informal
KANO musuem for the team.

The building, still sporting sweet-smelling
tatami mats and sliding paper doors in the Japanese style, houses the
offices of the Kano Alumni Association and is open Monday to Friday
for tourists, scholars and history buffs.

Inside, there is a library with dozens of copies of the Kano Alumni
Assocation annual magazine, still published in Chinese by National
Chiayi University, and hundreds of old black-and-white photographs of
the 1931 baseball squad.

Outside in the courtyard of the old wooden
building at 188 Zongxian Road there's even a statue of one of the
original team's players holding up a bat and seemingly still ready to
play ball.

It's not a big house, and it's closed on weekends. A staff of three
volunteers run the office, handle mail and email inquries from around
the world for Kano alumni and is getting ready for what might be long
lines of tourists once the "KANO" movie is released. For now, it's a
quiet place near a quiet backstreet in downtown Chiayi, and it gets
few visitors. But all this might change once the movie
KANO is released in Taiwan and Japan.

"From time to time, some Japanese tourists will stop here," says Miss Yu,
a senior at National Chiayi University (NCYU), who works
part-time as a secretary. "Last summer, a Japanese reporter from the
Sankei Shmbun newspaper came here to look around and ask us some
questions about the movie, and three French tourists stopped by in
August while visiting the city's temples. Other than that, we mostly
do administrative work and keep the alumni files up to date."

The Chiayi city government sees an opportunity in the 2014 release of
the Wei-produced movie, which is said to be a cross between a baseball
drama and a love story. Yes, Wei wrote a young woman into the script,
and she'll be the love interest of one of the players.

So with
expectations high that the movie will attract tourists from across
Taiwan and Japan in the future, the city government's tourism
department donated a nice chunk of change to help fund the movie.

Nearby, National Chung Cheng University (CCU) in Minschiung, just a
30-minute bus ride from Chiayi, is planning on setting up a
tourism-related movie location tourist attraction about the movie,
since some of the action scenes will be filmed at CCU.

According to Angel Chen, a graduate student working on her master's
degree in marketing, the movie's connection to Chiayi and Taiwan's
colonial history during the Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945)
offers a "'perfect storm' of public relations and tourism
opportunities for all those involved in the movie's production.

Location shooting for the movie is going on now, in Chiayi, Taichung,
Tainan and Kaohsiung, according to film industry sources. Some sets
will be built and many locals have been hired as extras to appear in
various crowd scenes.

Umin Boya, an Aboriginal actor in his 30s who
was in the cast of "Seediq Bale," is directing the movie from a script
by Wei.

The director, who played baseball himself, as a teenager, told
reporters earlier this year, that he understands the emotions of ball
players and is looking forward to the film's release, not only in
Taiwan, but in Japan and other countries in Asia.

Lu Yi-rong, a Chiayi resident who loves movies, auditioned for a role
in KANO when the casting crew came to town over the summer. The casting
director was looking for a few local people to play certain roles in the movie,
and she was looking for a few young men and women to be part of the movie.

Miss Lu tried out in a field of over 200 people who also were auditioning in
a makeshift studio in the city's central library, and although she did not make
the final cut, she said she had fun trying out for the movie.

"I like movies, all kinds of movies," she said. "I thought it would be fun to
audition for KANO, even if I didn't get a role. And it was fun, to be there,
to see all the excitement in the room, as 200 other people were auditioning, and
even though the process took a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, it
was worth the time and energy to see how auditions go. Maybe later I can be
an extra in some crowd scenes, when Umin Boya shots on location in Chiayi."

Masato Fujishima, a Japanese reporter for the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, has
visited the Kano museum in Chiayi since Japanese baseball fans are
very interested in the story of the Kano team of 1931. Imperial Japan
in those days had colonies in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria, and teams
from those regions were invited to Koshien, too, if they made the
grade.

But only the KANO team from Taiwan was invited to the all-Japan
championships, and not just once, according to Fujishima, but five
times. However, it was only the 1931 team that played their hearts out
all the way to the Koshien finals, almost stealing the show, but
ending up coming in second instead with a very good showing.

According to Fujishima, the 1931 KANO team won the hearst of Japanese baseball
fans back then, and even today, the story has not been forgotten among
Japanese baseball buffs. So a feature movie about the team, set in the
1930s and adding a love story to the drama of the final game in Kobe
on a hot summer day, should go over well in Japan, too.

The movie will tell the story of a high
school baseball team comprised of three ethnic groups -- Japanese, Han
Chinese and Aboriginal boys -- and one tough
Japanese coach.
It's based on a true story.

The ''Chiayi Norin Gakko'' team -- let's
just call them the ''Chiayi Aggies'' in translation here -- took a
boat to Japan in the summer of 1931 and turned a lot of heads in Kobe.
By some kind of baseball miracle, the teenage boys from Taiwan fooled
the experts in Imperial japan and came in second.

That Koshien tourney
run and final game is now part of island lore in Taiwan, but for most
people it's long forgotten story. "KANO" hopes to put a new spin on
it.

While the KANO team is history now, it's "never give up" attitude will
be a big part of the movie, according to Umin Boya. And with an
unofficial KANO museum and outdoor shrine still standing in the middle
of Chiayi today, the building's staff is getting ready for what might
just be a big tourism boom when the film is finally finished and released.

If all goes well, "KANO" might become an Asian baseball classic, and
maybe even garner an Oscar for best foreign film when it's released.
If that happens, the nondescript little KANO museum in Chiayi will
need a new coat of blue paint.

The unofficial KANO ''museum'' is at 188 Zhongxiao Road in Chiayi City, and is open Monday to Friday, 9 am to 12 noon and 2 pm to 5 pm. The offices are closed
on Saturday and Sunday.