The Texture of Fog — How A Foggy Tale Delivers White Terror Through One Person's Errand

A Comedy Director Faces the Fog

Audiences familiar with Chen Yu-hsun's (陳玉勲) previous work may feel something shift when they encounter this film.

He marked 1990s Taiwanese cinema with the warm human comedies Tropical Fish (1995) and Love Go Go (1997), then won multiple Golden Horse Awards for My Missing Valentine (2020, original title: 消失的情人節) — a film about a couple who each lose a day to a mysterious temporal slip. Why is this director making a film about the White Terror?²

And yet, calling this a total departure may not hold. Running through Chen's work is a consistent attention to ordinary people living outside institutions. In Tropical Fish, a kidnapped boy dissolves naturally into village life. In My Missing Valentine, a bizarre rupture in time is handled as the couple's quiet, unremarkable confusion. He begins from individual texture, not large historical narrative.

What changes in A Foggy Tale is that the ground beneath the individual is the White Terror itself. And the fog is no longer merely limited visibility — it is what state power produces when it erases information and enforces silence through fear.

The Logic of Retrieving a Body

If the film avoids the traps of the historical drama, it is because Agui's goal is not "exposing the White Terror" but "retrieving her brother's body" — a specific, practical problem.

Bodies of executed people cost money to reclaim. Agui has to find that money. She nearly gets sold to a brothel. A rickshaw puller named Zhao Gongdao (趙公道) comes to her aid. Together they look for ways to raise the funds. According to accounts of the film, most of its running time is spent not in grand historical testimony but in this unglamorous, urgent practical work.³

Zhao Gongdao is a former soldier of the Kuomintang — a man who served the very state that executed Agui's brother. The film reportedly does not turn this into overt drama. The two do not debate their histories. They move through the same fog, two lonely figures running in parallel. That parallel arrangement quietly demonstrates what the White Terror did to human arrangements: a victim and a servant of the perpetrators meet and keep each other going — not as accusation, not as reconciliation, but as the practical work of survival.

Fog as Visual Language

The original Chinese title 大濛 (Dà Méng) means something like "deep" or "great" fog. The film's recreation of 1950s Taiwan earned it Golden Horse Awards for production design and costume,¹ but the way fog is used appears to exceed historical accuracy as a goal.

Opening sugarcane fields, fog-draped Taipei alleys — by all accounts, what Agui sees is consistently restricted.³ Fog works as a metaphor for opacity. Who holds power? Why was her brother executed? What logic governs the state? The girl cannot see. She can only keep moving without knowing.

The interesting point is that the fog does not appear to function as a device that "hides the truth for dramatic effect." It seems to recreate the actual epistemic situation of people living through that time. White Terror victims frequently were never told why their family members had been arrested. The fog is an artifact of information control; the limited visibility is an effect of fear.

A Musician Standing Past the Fog

9m88, who plays the character Axia (阿霞), is a widely known Taiwanese R&B and jazz singer.¹ Her casting reads as more than a marketing move — it is a layering of cultural timelines.

Her music lives at the intersection of contemporary Taiwanese urban sensibility and the inheritance of 1950s and 60s jazz and soul. When that voice stands inside a 1950s set, the present and the past pull toward each other in the same frame. In historical film, a figure who embodies the contemporary gives audiences a way to calibrate their distance from the past.

This remains speculation from the position of someone who has not seen the film, but the casting choice seems to signal that the film is not aimed only at the past.

The Closing Numbers Bridge Two Times

(The following touches on the film's final sequence.)

According to accounts of the film, after Agui searches for her brother's remains, the screen runs a sequence of Republic of China calendar year numbers.⁴ Starting in the 1950s, continuing through 1987 when Taiwan lifted martial law, and beyond — the numbers keep appearing.

What this does is clear. It connects one person's time of loss to social time. What Agui experienced inside that fog was not hers alone — it was one point in decades of enforced silence. The film shows this without saying it.

The sequence does not amplify emotion. Numbers follow numbers. What stays is their length. White Terror did not simply end when martial law was lifted in 1987, and its wounds continue in contemporary Taiwanese society. Placing individual grief and the duration of history in the same frame — that may be the largest wager this film makes.

The Distance Taiwanese Cinema Travels Toward History — Monga as Reference

Before returning to box office figures, it is worth drawing a reference line through another Taiwanese film.

Monga (2010, original title: 艋舺) is a youth ensemble film set in the Wanhua district of Taipei in the early 1980s.⁵ Directed by Doze Niu (鈕承澤), it follows a group of boys through friendship, betrayal, gang rivalries, and the passage into adulthood — and it broke Taiwanese domestic box office records at the time of its release.

The film does not take the White Terror as its direct subject. But the setting carries weight. Taiwan in the early 1980s remains under martial law. KMT one-party rule continues, and the connections between the party and local organized crime are common knowledge spoken of by no one — that opacity hangs over the Wanhua backstreets. The boys move within a grammar of loyalty and brotherhood; they cannot see the full shape of the power that encloses them. The structure of that unseen quality rhymes with Agui's situation in A Foggy Tale — though the content is entirely different.

The timelines connect as well. The "1987" that A Foggy Tale's closing year sequence finally reaches sits just ahead of where Monga's boys are living. The fog through which Agui tried to reclaim her brother in the 1950s has, after thirty years of silence, drifted into the same backstreets in a different form.

The choices the two films make as Taiwanese cinema are opposite. Monga did not stage the White Terror years directly. It delivered their weight as the backdrop to 1980s youth, and still became a major hit.

A Foggy Tale takes no such detour. It goes directly into the 1950s core of the White Terror, placing a body that must be retrieved, and the girl who comes for it, at the center.

Monga's domestic box office was approximately NT$260 million — itself a record at the time.[^monga] *A Foggy Tale* exceeded NT$500 million, roughly double. Numbers cannot measure a film, and there is fifteen years of inflation in the comparison. Still, the fact that a film more directly committed to the wound of that history reached more people stands.

The distance Taiwanese audiences are able to travel toward their own history has changed in fifteen years. That much can be said.

What NT$500 Million Asks

A Foggy Tale surpassed NT$500 million at the Taiwanese domestic box office, placing it alongside Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lust, Caution, and Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. It won four Golden Horse Awards at the 62nd ceremony: Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design.¹

These figures are not just a success story — they pose a question. The White Terror remains politically sensitive in contemporary Taiwan. Those who support the KMT and those who support the DPP evaluate this period of history very differently. What does it mean that a film about the White Terror reached this wide an audience?

Chen's approach appears to deliberately distance itself from the grammar of partisan opposition. Agui's ordeal is not framed as a critique of any particular party — it is framed as a question of personal dignity in the face of state power. That may be why it reached so many people, or it may be a source of dissatisfaction for some.

Reducing history to a single person's practical scale, and maintaining the obscurity of the fog — this may be aiming for a way of reaching people that lasts longer than the sharpness of accusation.

A Map for Before You Watch

This piece is written without having seen the film. It traces only structure readable from secondary sources and published criticism. Nothing can be said here about the actual texture of the images, the sound, the physical movement of the actors, the spacing of the cuts.

What needed to be written was a way of organizing the shape of the questions this film sets up. A thirteen-year-old girl stands before a state that charges money for the bodies it executes. That smallness pulls the enormous historical violence of the White Terror back to human scale.

There is a body inside the fog. Going to retrieve it becomes a film.

Trailer

References