Huang Mingchuan′s first film -- the first truly independent feature ever made in Taiwan -- tells two stories at once. One of them, told principally in voice-over, is very ancient: a founding myth from the Atayal tribe (one of the twenty tribes which inhabited Taiwan before the Chinese) about Mouna and his son Yawi, who led the tribe to deliverance. The other story is modern: the story of Ming, a man from Taipei, who crashes his car in an Atayal village by the sea and stays, apparently in search of something secret. The two stories gradually intersect, as if Ming is somehow reliving the fate of the legendary Yawi.. No Taiwanese film before The Man from Island West had tried to deal with the problems of the island′s aboriginal peoples from either a socio-economic point of view or a historical point of view. Huang′s film not only does both but also goes further. It also has a powerful psychological dimension, centred on the father-son gestalt, and it has the wit to link this with both Atayal founding myth and the distorted version of Christianity which is so popular among Taiwan′s aboriginals. It′s a very considerable achievement. (Tony Rayns)