As a government-funded program intended to bring art-house films to a wider audience, POP Cinema (國民戲院) begins this year's screening series with the Taiwan vs. South Europe Film Festival (台灣VS.南歐影展). The six-week event features 26 films from Italy, Greece and Portugal, along with four local films focusing on women.
The festival comprises five programs, two of which are retrospectives of films made by the Greek master Theo Angelopulos and veteran Portuguese filmmaker Joao Cesar Monteiro. Apart from the works of these two heavyweight film masters, programmer Chang Chu-ti (張筑悌) said the festival aims to put more emphasis on films adapted from literary works, especially those from southern European countries.
"I'd like to introduce to Taiwanese audiences more great films that blossom from the rich and fascinating world of literature," Chang said.
These include several award-winning films, with stories of love, passion and lust, and also of friendship, human affinity, maternal love and a nostalgic longing for the lost innocence of childhood.
The festival started yesterday and will continue through May 27 at SPOT -- Taipei Film House (光點台北). The festival will then tour the country, stopping at the Performance Hall at the Taoyuan County Government building, Hsinchu Municipal Image Museum (新竹影像博物館), Taichung Universal Cinema City (台中市環球影城), and the Kao-hsiung Film Archive (高雄電影圖書館).
Theo Angelopulos has carved an important place for himself among the greatest auteurs of world cinema, and has, without a doubt, won the hearts of Taiwanese art-house moviegoers with his signature long-takes, picturesque compositions, fluid camera movements and poetic and philosophical reflections on the history and spirit of his homeland, Greece. The festival will showcase seven of his works to represent the artist's evolution as a filmmaker.
One of Angelopulos' early works, The Traveling Players (1975) tells of the troubled modern history of Greece, from the Nazi occupation of World War II to the devastating civil war. The story centers around an acting troupe traveling through rural Greek villages, attempting to perform, only to be interrupted by air raids, gunfire, murder and arrests.
Landscape in the Mist (1988) is a road movie telling the story of a 14-year-old girl named Voula and her little brother, Alexander, on a journey in search of their father. As the story unfolds, film begins to stray farther from the reality and into the world of metaphor and allegory. It is about an existential voyage searching for the unattainable.
As one of the director's recent works, Eternity and a Day, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 1998 and is about a dying poet who gains a better understanding of his alienation as a troubled observer of Greece through his friendship with an Albanian child refugee.
The Taiwan festival chose the lastest Angelopulos movie to be its opening film. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow is the first part of the filmmaker's grand new trilogy, which aims to depict the history of Greece from the early years of the last century to the present. This film signals a return to the vast stage of The Traveling Players, in which individuality gives way to the biblical force of history. It is a departure from his recent works, in which historical and political events are reflected through the experience and fabled odyssey of a single individual.
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