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Saddle up for the Golden Horse

A stranger of mine PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI GOLDEN HORSE FILM FESTIVAL

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.

Battle in heaven

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.

Blood and bones

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.

Changing times

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.

Housewarming

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.

Woman of breakwater

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.

What: 2005 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival When: Nov. 4 to Nov. 17 Where: Warner Village Cinema in Xinyi district (信義華納威秀影城) Tickets: NT$220 for single ticket; NT$190 for students, available through ERA ticketing outlets or online at http://www.ticket.com.tw ★For information on screenings in cities besides Taipei, check the festival's official Web site at www.goldenhorse.org.tw

"Global Vision" presents 38 films from 32 countries in Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa and Europe. Cannes winner The Forsaken Land from Sri Lanka follows the story of a woman and a man burdened by love and guilt. A Stranger of Mine traces the lives of five characters in a neurotically funny take on modern life in Japan. Woman of Breakwater from the Philippines brings to light the cruel, sometimes unbearable, stories of people living below the poverty line.

Battle in Heaven and Japon, both desolate cinematic landscapes crafted by Carlos Reygadas the rising star of world cinema from Mexico are must-sees.

Orlando Vargas from Uruguay is a stylish, beautifully composed film about the disappearance of a disheartened businessman.

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael from the UK is a highly controversial work that puts A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick to shame.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu employs a documentary approach to tell of a 63-year-old man's attempts to receive medical attention on one Saturday evening. The film offers a poignant view on the absurdity of modern medical and social welfare systems.

"The Digital Shorts (R)evolution" segment takes a comprehensive look at the development of digital films over the past decade.

The category features six sections curated by two prestigious establishments for digital and experimental cinema, Onedotzero from the UK and Light Cone from France.

The films grouped in this section form an extensive discourse on both the force of digital filmmaking and the complex relation between digital processes, film, cinema and other media.

Included in these selections are rarely seen works by pioneering and important figures on the avant-garde side of cinema, such as Stan Brakhage, Nathaniel Dorsky, Peter Kubelka, Naomi Uman, Mike Hoolboom and Takashi Ito, to just name a few. For those who are keen on exploring cutting-edge work that is sometimes subversive, the films of these six sections are not to be missed.

The "International Digital Shorts Competition," the only competition section in the TGHFF, features nine local productions and 36 international entrants scheduled to be shown from next Tuesday through Friday.

Tony Wu (吳俊輝), a member of the jury, said this collection of works is designed to explore the future trends in, and the potential of, digital cinematography.

The films were selected based on their insight into the potential direction of digital technology and their ability to present new visual and aesthetic experiences.

Such criteria make the category the most cinematically challenging section of the festival.

Empire is a powerful experimental short which questions the US-led war on terrorism by juxtaposing president Bush's speeches with TV commercials from the 1950s and digital graphics of weapons and soldiers. The film offers a world view different from that presented by the mass media and in which the sweet and innocent American life way of life is twisted and deformed by the shadow of imperialism.

While Darwin Sleeps by Paul Bush from the UK is made up of single frames taken from still photographs of 300 insect specimens and edited into a myriad of combinations to create a visually stunning composition. His other short, Shinjuku Samurai, employs similar methods placing single-frame portraits against a fast moving urban landscape. Nomadic Glimpses from Argentina is a theater of voyeurism made up of thousands of fragments.

Another must-see is Austrian master Peter Tscherkassky's Instruction for a Light and Sound Machine, a filmic discourse on the essence of the media. Murder Face and Lost in Remembering are two enlightening experimental pieces by local filmmaker Ma Chun-fu (馬君輔), who, instead of using images to construct and narrate, uses the media to abolish the imagery itself.
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