Fans of art house movies will be able to get their fix beginning Saturday, June 2, when the Central Motion Picture Corp (CMPC) Art Film Festival makes its annual way to the big screen in Taipei.
When the festival debuted last year it screened movies from Iran, Yugoslavia, Germany and Poland. While the movies chosen wouldn't have warranted general release in Taiwan, the CMPC discovered that there was a surprisingly large number of art house movie fans wanting to see the films.
"We nearly sold out all the advanced tickets before the festival stated last year. I guess the popularity of the festival was due to a sudden interest in Iranian cinema in Taiwan. We screened two Iranian movies and both of them proved hugely popular with audiences," recalls CMPC's director of acquisitions, Jennifer Jao (
While last year's festival offered audiences a wide range of international movies, this year the festival will play host to films from only two countries. Riding on the continuing popularity of Iranian cinema, organizers have included three such films. The festival's three other movies all hail from Spain. Organizers had hoped to screen films from a single country, but had to abandon the idea.
"Our original intention was to only have films from Spain at this year's festival. Unfortunately, however, we found that many of the Spanish movies we looked at weren't really up to par. We obviously didn't want to screen just any old movie. We wanted to screen films that were generally worthy of being part of an international film festival," explains Jao. "So we settled for purchasing several Iranian movies and screening them with the Spanish films we felt were worth including."
Representing Iranian cinema are the directors Kamal Tabrizi, Babak Payami and Mohammad Ali Talebi. All three have enjoyed substantial success in recent years on the world stage.
Representing Spain are Joan Potau, Miguel Albaladejo and Fernando Trueba, who was awarded an Oscar in 1993 for the best foreign-language film for his Belle Epoque (The Age of Beauty).
Kicking off this year's festival is Kamal Tabrizi's 1997 Mehr-E Madari (Maternal Love). The film met with great success when it screened at the Berlin Children's Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival five years ago. The movie tells the story of the relationship between a young boy who refuses to accept his mother's death and the social worker assigned to him who realizes the need to keep her emotional distance while at the same time trying desperately to preserve her own gradually crumbling family life.
The festival's other movies all broach the topic of relationships in some way.
Miguel Albaladejo's 1999 comedy, Manolito Gafotas, looks at the estranged relationship between a young, rather portly boy and his father. Mohammad Ali Taledi's Beed-o Beed (Willow & Wind) is a compelling drama that follows the lives of a young Iranian boy and the relationship he has with his classmates, some of whom don't treat the young protagonist nicely at all.
In Badak Payami's One More Day, from 1999, the plight of women in modern Iran is laid bare for the camera. The director tackles the taboo subject of sex out of wedlock, as the film takes viewers to Tehran following a man and woman who become romantically attached at the turn of the millennium.
While not an award-winning movie, Joan Potau's comedy Love is in the Air was Spain's most successful comedy of 2000. The movie looks at family life and tells of one man's search for the ideal functional family.
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