CAPE No. 7 is the little movie that could.

It was made by an unknown director, Wei Te-sheng, who had one previously unreleased feature to his credit.

He took out loans and mortgaged his house and it has paid off in a monster hit.The movie was made on a scraped together budget of NT$50 million (S$2.3 million), but it has broken box-office records in its native Taiwan with takings of over NT$450 million since its release on Aug 22 this year.

Cape No. 7 is the second-highest grossing movie of all time there, after James Cameron's sweeping drama Titanic (1997). It opens in Singapore next Thursday.

Here to promote the movie, the 40-year-old writer/director is casually dressed in a brown sleeveless zip-up vest over T-shirt and jeans at the press conference at Marina Square.

Asked how he feels about the success of his film, he says: 'It's not something I think about. Our greatest satisfaction is that audiences love this movie.'

The soft-spoken man is the same tenacious film-maker who clung on to his film, which is about a no-hope amateur music band in the seaside town of Hengchun, even when things looked grim.

The story weaves in a romance between a Japanese teacher and a Taiwanese woman which took place 60 years ago when Taiwan was a Japanese colony.

Cape No. 7 refers to the woman's address.The never-say-die spirit of the characters struck a chord with Taiwanese cultural phenomenon, a bright spark amid political scandals in the country and gloomy economic news.

Read the full story in Wednesday's edition of The Straits Times' Life!