The Golden Horse Film Festival closes today after two weeks of screening many of the past year's most acclaimed films along with a host of classics. Wrapping up the festival today will be screenings of three audience favorites.
The Japanese sci-fi Avalon, which received the highest number of viewer votes as the best film in the festival, will be today's first screening at 10:30am. The movie is a hallucinatory combination of computer game and real life that bears striking thematic similarities to Matrix and has the visual appeal of a late-generation version of Tron.
Following Avalon at 12:30pm will be Jean-Jacques Beineix's Mortal Transfer. The movie was chosen as the third-best film in the festival, according to audience votes. At moments hilarious, at others downright morbid, the movie follows a psychoanalyst who is ensnared in a mental trap laid by a highly disturbed and seductive patient that leads him to question his role in her death.
The final film to be shown in the festival will be the audiences' fourth-most popular movie Divided We Fall, by Czech director Jan Hrebejk. The movie was nominated for a Best Foreign Film award at this year's Oscars.
Czech films proved extremely popular at this year's festival. In addition to fourth-placed Divided We Fall, Jan Svankmajer's Otesanek placed fifth, according to audience votes. The reels for Otesanek, however, were already sent out of the country, and so will not receive a final screening today.
The Japanese film Battle Royale by Kinji Fukasaku, received the second-highest number of votes and saw its fourth sold-out screening last night.
Conspicuously absent from the viewer choice award line-up are both of the festival's opening films Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and The Son's Room by Nani Moretti, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Millennium Mambo has been roundly panned by critics and must be chalked up as one of the festival's major disappoinments.
The action now moves to Hualien, where the Golden Horse Awards ceremony will take place next weekend, conferring top honors on this year's best Chinese-language films.
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