Saddle up for the Golden Horse

The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (台北金馬影展), Taiwan's answer to the Oscars, begins today.

With more than two 200 art-house, feature and short films shown in a 14-day period, the country's biggest movie festival is expected to bring floods of film lovers to the screening venues at the Warner Village Cinema complex in Xinyi district.

To present an exciting collection of works by renowned filmmakers and emerging talents alike, films from every continent were selected from major film festivals throughout the year .

A series of guest speeches, panel discussions, seminars and special screenings are also scheduled to be held during the festival with the aim of strengthening international exchanges in the industry.

After the primary screenings in Taipei, the festival will go on tour until mid-December, stopping at Keelung, Kaohsiung, Changhua, Taichung, Hsinchu and Hualien.

Many of the screenings in Taipei have already sold out but there are still many opportunities to enjoy some outstanding non-Hollywood movies.

The "Master Class" section presents a collection of works by internationally esteemed directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Peter Greenaway, Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders from Germany and Raoul Ruiz, Alain Cabalier and Manoel di Oliveira from France.

Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi joined together to make Tickets, a triptych composed of three interconnected stories which take place on a train journey from Central Europe to Rome.

Changing Times by veteran director Andre Techine teams up two of France's national treasures, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, and tells the tale of two aging lovers coming to terms with long-lost love.

Also worth watching is Filmman a poetic documentary about a filmmaker's relationship with his camera, by French director Alain Cavalier. The autobiographic film took nearly 10 years to complete.

The Wild Blue Yonder by Werner Herzog is a space fantasy which fuses images from outer space and underwater scenes to convey the director's views on humankind and the universe.

Regrettably, most spotlighted films in this section sold out quickly, including 85-year-old Ingmar Bergman's final work Saraband, Jim Jarmusch's Cannes winner Broken Flowers and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's second Cannes' Golden Palm Award winner The Child.

The "Celebration of Cinema" category presents a collection of world cinema films selected from this year's international film festivals.

Lemming, the opening film of this year's Cannes International Film Festival, is about a dead rodent in the drain which triggers the collapse of a couple's once ideal and orderly life.

In Housewarming, the audience gets to see icy-looking French beauty Carole Bouquet playing a lawyer who dances and sings her way through this French comedy.

Blood and Bones is an epic film by Sai Yoiachi which depicts the harsh and bloodstained life of a Korean immigrant moving to Japan on the eve of the World War II.

Another film worth watching is The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes by the Quay Brothers. They returned to feature films after a decade to present a fable set in a completley mechanized era. The film mixes animation with puppetry and bizarre costumes.

A big winner at this year's Cesar Awards in France, L'Esquive offers a refreshing look at a 15-year-old boy's life in the suburbs of Paris.