Mikan no Taikyoku
The film "Mikan no Taikyoku" [1] was directed by Ji-shun Duan (or Duah) and Junya Sato in 1982. This film was the first co-production between Japan and China, which was a revolution in international relations.
This movie was released in China in 1983. In Mandarin, it is called "Yu pan mei you xia wan de qi."
In 1986, it was released in the USA as "The GO Masters."
The starring role is played by Sun Dao-Lin. It is 123 minutes long.
It is very loosely based on some incidents in the life of Go Seigen, about ten years before World War II began. A Japanese Go master and a very strong Chinese prodigy play a game in China.
Links for this movie:
- Roger Ebert gave it
three and a half stars in 1986. He was on the jury that gave it First Prize at the Montreal Film Festival.
- The
Internet Movie Database gives it a high rating.
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http://www.rottentomatoes.com/p/SunDaoLin-1003769/
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http://www.reel.com/movie.asp?MID=4403
- Copyrighted material that was posted here has been removed. Use
this link and scroll down
Go Seigen apparently does not like this movie. By contrast, he is working with the producers of the new movie being made now (2004). This is from an interview he gave in 1983 (thanks to John Fairbairn for posting on r.g.g):
T: Last year I saw the acclaimed film - a Sino-Japanese joint venture - "The unfinished game". It involves a young genius from China who wanted to be a professional go player in Japan before the war, who came to Tokyo to study, and who finally conquered the professional go world. It sketches the relationships beyween go players in Japan and China and so in part at least you must have been the model.
G: Yes. I was shown a scenario before the film was made, and there are characters similar to me and my teacher Segoe (Kensaku, 9d). But I died when I was young and my teacher went mad, so it is not all a true story.
That film was also shown overseas and a Taiwanese police chief saw it and took it for granted that I had died. When he happened to come to Tokyo recently, we met. Well, he was so overjoyed that I was alive and well, he hugged me! (laughs)
Hans-Georg: A heavily compressed DivX AVI file of this movie (300 MB for 2 hours, 15 minutes [differs from IMDB and Ebert timing]) can be found on some servers that also carry the Hikaru no Go series (like ftp.hikago.flirble.org under Misc). But be warned: the quality of the file is very bad. Not only is the resolution very low and the entire movie full of compression artifacts, but, worse, the contrast is so extreme that much of the dark or bright scenes is invisible as pure black or white. The worst, however, is that the sound is initially synchronized with the video but drifts until it is some 10 seconds late at the end of the movie. This last defect is particularly insidious because you don't notice it when you check the beginning.
In other words, I cannot recommend downloading and watching it unless you're very desperate.
This is a pity. If anybody finds or creates a better video file, which with current compression technology should be some 1.3 to 2 GB in size, I would be very interested.
[1] Mikan no Taikyoku (未完の対局) translates to "The Unfinished Game" or something along those lines. - Chris Hayashida