After a string of strong showings at international film festivals over the past several years, Taiwanese movies are some of the most anticipated entries at this year's Cannes festival.
Both Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) have new works in this year's competition list, as they both did in 1998. This year, the two are accompanied by a youngblood of Taiwanese filmmaking, Hsiao Ya-chuan (蕭雅全), whose film Mirror Image (命帶追逐) will run in the Director's Fortnight portion of the festival, a separate competition intended to honor and encourage young filmmakers and which issues an International Critics Award.
Tsai's film What Time Is It There? (你那邊幾點) will premiere May 15 and Hou's Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波) will run on May 19. Hsiao's film will be shown May 11.
The screenings of Tsai's and Hou's films during the final days of the festival bode well for their chances at winning an award, as the best contenders have traditionally had late slots at Cannes.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
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