Who will take the prize?

The Golden Horse Film Festival is not merely a huge showcase of nearly 100 acclaimed films, it also offers a an annual award, the Golden Horse Award (金馬獎) -- known to many as "Taiwan's Oscar" -- to acknowledge Chinese-language films. Starting today, the festival will have a special screening session for the Golden Horse Award nominees, a good chance to check out the best-of-the-best Chinese films over the past year.

Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan's (關錦鵬) Lan Yu (藍宇) has been nominated in nine categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography. Kwan is known for his delicate and meticulous style of storytelling, which audiences have always found captivating. His ground-breaking films, such as Rouge (胭脂扣), The Actress (1991, 阮玲玉) and Red Rose, White Rose (紅玫瑰與白玫瑰, 1994), are refined works that depict the lives and desires of women, and have garnered him several past Golden Horse Awards. Lan Yu is Kwan's first film dealing with the sentiments of a gay romance since making his own sexual orientation public three years ago.

Lan Yu is about a middle-aged business man, Handong, who meets a university student named Lan Yu in Beijing. Handong discovers Lan Yu's sexual orientation and is offered his first romantic encounter with a man. But with the age difference between the two and the class seperation dividing them, Lan Yu knows the relationship is doomed. They argue and make up again and again and even survive the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 together. Nonetheless, Handong later decides to marry a woman. Their several encounters after Handong's divorce prove that he cannot forget about Lan Yu and so tries going back to him and the good times they shared.

Shifting his focus from women to gay men, Kwan's narrative conveys moving elements which easily let the audience settle into the romance. What is valuable about Lan Yu is that it tells story set in Beijing from the perspective of a Hong Konger. By focusing on a universal story of love, Kwan has avoided sensationalizing the homosexual community in Beijing.

The film was selected to show in the "A Certain Regard" category of this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Another film dealing with Beijing is Wang Xiaoshuai's (王小帥) Beijing Bicycle (十七歲的單車), produced by Arc Light Films. The film tells a story of two teenage boys, both struggling with their different but equally poor families and childhoods. In a city like Beijing, with hundreds of thousands of bicycles plying the roads and hutung (胡同, tiny lanes), a brand new bicycle is a means to win the hearts of girls, make a living and gain an identity among peers. And so the two begin bickering over who is the rightful owner of a shiny new set of wheels.

The film has excellent scenes of people's lives in and about the city's catacomb of hutung contrasted against fast-growing downtown Beijing, which has an obvious influence on the young minds of the main characters. As the film's Chinese title, The 17-Year-Old Bicycle, suggests, this is a story about growing up. And for boys in Beijing, growing up means being cool, street-tough, and slightly frayed around the edges, both physically and mentally. The film was this year's Silver Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival.

Tsai Ming-Liang's (蔡明亮) What Time Is It There? (你那邊幾點) was another highly praised film at this year's Cannes. In fact, it was initially predicted to win the Palme d`Or. This French-financed film is pure Tsai style; caustic black comedy about alienation and emotional obsession. Three different obsessions are brilliantly interwoven: a mom obsessing about her father's ghost coming back to haunt the family; a girl, Hsiang-chih, obsessed with going to Paris; and the lead character, Hsiao Kang, who is obsessed about the time difference between Taipei and Paris and her deceased father.