Last year the Taipei Film Festival brought you to Paris and Prague. This year the cinematic journey takes you to Kyoto and Melbourne. The former is Japan's elegant ancient capital and the birthplace of Japanese cinema. While Melbourne doesn't have any such claim to cinematic fame, Australia has certainly been the birthplace of many highly coveted international stars. The two cities were chosen to be the focus cities for the fifth Taipei Film Festival, which will be held from March 9 to March 22.
Tickets for the festival will be available from tomorrow. As films by master directors Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Peter Weir and Sean Penn will be showcased this year, tickets are expected to sell fast. They will be on sale from 2pm tomorrow at SPOT -- Taipei Film House and through Acer ticketing, where movie fans can pick up individual tickets for NT$150 or a book of 12 tickets for NT$1,500.
The section on Kyoto entitled "The Capital of Eiga" (meaning cinema in Japanese) will showcase rarely seen classics of the Japanese cinema such as Yasujiro Ozu's Equinox Flower and Kurosawa's No Regrets to My Youth. Equinox Flower was Ozu's first color movie. The film, which starred a former Miss Japan, was shot in color at the film company's request so as to display the beauty of the star and the classical elegance of Kyoto.
Three-times Oscar nominated director Peter Weir (Witness 1985, Dead Poet's Society 1989 and The Truman Show 1998) has his early films showcased in the Australian New Wave Retrospective section. Picnic at Hanging Rock is a film with stunning images and music depicting an eerie story about a student at a Catholic girls school who mysteriously goes missing during a picnic.
Also to be showcased in this section are works by Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy 1989) and Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games 1992 and The Quiet American 2003).
One of the most anticipated sections, however, is the Master's Short Films, which will include 11'09''01 -- September 11, a film that brought together 11 directors to each make a nine-minute film related to the Sept. 11 incident. They include British filmmaker Ken Loach (My Name is Joe 1998 and Sweet Sixteen 2002), French director Claude Lelouch (Chance or Coincidence 1999), Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf (Kandahar 2001) and US actor and director Sean Penn. As many of those acclaimed filmmakers express criticism of the US, the film triggered controversy in the 2002 Venice Film Festival. Many American film critics and journalists walked out of the cinema before the film ended in protest of the film's anti-American sentiments.
The closing film announced yesterday will be A One and a Two by Taiwan director Edward Yang.
Tickets will be available from SPOT -- Taipei Film House and through Acer ticketing outlets. For more information visit the Web site at http://www.ch5.tv/TIFF/ or call tel (02) 2778-1577.
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