This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) includes showings of Australian director Jeff Daniels’ film 10 Conditions of Love, a documentary on the life of World Uyghur Congress president Rebiya Kadeer. Festival organizers have also invited Kadeer to speak at the festival and attend the film’s premiere on Saturday.
The invitation drew an emphatic protest from China. Chinese producer Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯) and directors Zhao Liang (趙亮) and Emily Tang (唐曉白) withdrew their entries from the festival, while Chinese hackers defaced the festival’s Web site and sabotaged the ticket sales system. Taiwanese director Cheng Hsiao-tse’s (程孝澤) movie Miao Miao (渺渺), a Taiwanese and Hong Kong joint venture, was also pulled from the festival by the Hong Kong distributor.
Both the festival’s organizers and audience have been affected. Not only was the Australian government infuriated by China’s wanton attempts to interfere with freedom of expression, but local and international media outlets such as Agence France-Presse misunderstood Taiwan’s position on the matter.
Even though the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Australia made a timely statement and was able to communicate with local Taiwanese expatriates and media outlets, the Sunday Age, CBC News and the New York Times still carried stories about Taiwan from a mistaken point of view on Sunday, hurting the image both of Taiwan and of the Taiwanese film industry.
After festival organizers sternly requested that China refrain from interfering with the festival, the Chinese directors not only withdrew their films from the festival, but said that they would never attend Australian film festivals and related activities in the future.
This move has caused an array of criticism from the international movie industry. If the festival organizers had given in to China, the selection of films in other festivals would be affected by political factors as well. Many worried that this could destroy the freedom of expression that should be protected in international film festivals.
In addition, Taiwanese movies made in cooperation with companies in Hong Kong or other parts of China will likely not be able to participate in international film festivals in the future because of Chinese pressure. This is not a good thing for either movie producers or audiences.
While Jerry Chuang (莊正安), director of the Information Division at the TECO in Australia, managed to communicate directly with the festival organizers, movie-goers and local media outlets on the front line, the Chinese government resorted to a crude protest against the festival, which has backfired and instead intensified Australian animosity toward China, while also damaging Taiwan’s international profile.
We hope that the Taiwanese government will not only defend the rights and interests of the Taiwanese film industry, but also support the pursuit of basic human rights as well as the independence and freedom of expression of film festivals.
Taiwanese movie No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (不能沒有你), directed by Leon Dai (戴立忍), recently won the Best Feature Film award at the 30th Durban International Film Festival. This is ample evidence that Taiwanese movies are starting to shine on the international stage. I urge everybody to continue to support domestic movies and not let China dim the popularity of Taiwanese film.
Lee Yun-fen is former media coordinator at the Chinese Taipei Film Archive.
TRANSLATED BY TED YANG
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS