hey allen, i'm chinese from taiwan as well, i havent got a chance to put my portfolio on a website yet...hopefully i dont sound to critical or like a hypocrite since i cant link my work for everyone to see, but i'd like to share some of my experience and hopefully this'll help
i made my first short film at Hou Hsiao Hisen's first film study group in taiwan, i think it was back in 2003, it's called "the wall", they've actually posted at sinomovies.com for 2 years and i really appreciated...
however i felt like my film was a complete failure now i think about it...it's a story about a guy who gambles away his money in a game of majon...i had strong visual ideas like shooting the backs of the main character, city traffic seperating our individualism, a sequence of clocks to foucs on the idea of time as a wall itself, the game of majon, and ultimately him loosing all his money to prevent the main character on achieving his goal...
my film lacked real acting, and on 2 shots i used "cool" effects...i feel like it's my knowledge in design thats holding me back (i graduated as a graphic designer)...by the way if you get a chance to visit taiwan try to find a way to meet Hou Hsiao Hsien!!! O M G he is GOD, living film master is hard to come by, not only that he's also one of the few people i've met that has PURE knowledge in Tao
to me "Silence" falls into the same category of holding on to something, i feel like something's holding you back, forget it, let it go and do what you want, dont debate internally too much...
i had similar family experience as you did, i didnt truely understand the potiential in family conflict until i saw the film "Fists in the Pocket" by Marco Bellocchio...the main character's drive to bring order into family with influences from surrealism is just out of this world...
i also used voice over on my first film which i think was a bad idea, voice over is usually cheese unless done in a very smart way like "Midnight Cowboy"'s bus sequence...especially when your film is called "Silence", i almost feel like it should be a silent film, a study on the imageries of distance, miscommunications, and the confucian law, one of the great master on confucian law and i-ching's controlled chaos is Yasujiro Ozu, his silent film is quite good although i dont think you can get a copy of it in the states...Hou Hsiao Hsien also made a film to honor 100 years of Ozu called "Cafe Lumere"...which is also a VERY VERY good film if you're into chinese philosophy
in "Villain", i didn't get the idea of bad, i got the idea of temptations...short cuts to me is always very sexual, like the theory of men thinking about sex every 7 secs...a split second of fantasy...i think kurosawa hit the goldmine on villain with the film "The Bad Sleeps Well"...the common notion of a character with no conscious...if you're interested in the villain character, Mencius also have a great study on it, he focused on the beginnings instead of the judgement on their actions (which i dont think any filmmaker has done anything like this yet) on wikipedia.com just look up The Four Beginnings or Mencius you can get a feel for his ideas there
i only saw "Silence" and "Villain", couldn't find the links to other films, i'll be 28 this year, in some ways i feel like i've travelled some of the roads that you're taking (in terms of personal life experiences)...hopefully this helps!
peter
