A new poetry film from the Taiwanese filmmaker Ye Mimi is always an event. This one features a musical adaptation of a poem by Yin Ni from singer-songwriter Lo Sirong, performed with Gomoteu. The English translation in subtitles is by David Chen. Here’s the Vimeo description:

This experimental music video is based on a poem that both satirizes and celebrates local culture in Taiwan. “Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk,” the title of both the song and the poem, is a play on the Buddhist phrase “Hail the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.” The poem refers to local junk vendors, who repeatedly call out “sell them to me” as they walk from neighborhood to neighborhood looking for unwanted household items, typically scrap metal, tools and electronics.

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*List of screenings:

2015
The Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival, Malaysia
7th Cairo Video Festival, Egypt
Experimenta–8th International Festival of Moving Image Art in India, Bangalore

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A poem by Yin Ni
Music by Lo Sirong
Performed by Lo Sirong and Gomoteu
Filmed and edited by Ye Mimi

In North America and Western Europe, we tend to think of street poetry as this gritty, youth-driven, hyper-competitive and aggressive thing, but in most parts of the world, the streets and markets are wellsprings of a much more diverse and mature oral culture, and I think this filmpoem captures that brilliantly. Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk offers a unique glimpse into popular Buddhism and Taiwanese vernacular culture, and manages to seem simultaneously light-hearted and profound in a manner reminiscent of Erasmus or Rabelais.