For Wen, the key role of the festival is to help local productions go international. Every year after the festival ends, the organizer volunteers to select a group of films from the Taipei Awards competition for export to foreign film festivals. Last year, 25 films out of the selected 30 were screened outside Taiwan.
To build up its world-class status, since 2004, TFF has also included Global Chinese Films and Videos in its lineup and aims to become the international center of global Chinese cinema. This year sees the surge of gay-themed works such as Cut Sleeve Boys from UK and Innocent from Hong Kong. The award-winning Chinese film Dam Street (紅顏) presents a poignant view on women’s struggles in a conservative society while local veteran documentary filmmaker Huang Ting-fu (黃庭輔) murmurs out the story of betel nut beauties in meditative black-and-white imagery.
CITY VISIONS
As for this year’s City Vision sections, it features films from Montreal and Toronto, and fans of the Canadian master Atom Egoyan will surely be delighted by the mini-retrospective show that includes Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989) and The Adjuster (1991) and his latest work Where the Truth Lies, which is the festival’s closing film.
Another welcome surprise is idiosyncratic David Cronenberg whose 1988 classical Dead Ringers starring Jeremy Irons and early experimental sci-fi will satisfy the cult movie crowd. Other must-sees among the 166 films screened during the festival include the collaboration between Canadian Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini in the short My Dad 100 Years Old where the actress plays the roles of Hitchcock, Fellini and Chaplin to pay tribute to her father Roberto Rossellini in the celebration of the centennial anniversary of his birth. The Sun is the last piece of the trilogy by the Russian master Alexander Sokurov, which reexamines the life of Japanese emperor Hirohito.
As for the program director’s personal favorite, the film school textbook classics Warrendale, A Married Couple and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company by the legendary figure in non-fictional cinema Allan King will also be shown. They are a revelation in how documentary films can stir up the deepest emotional resonance through the exceptional intimacy shared by the observer and his subjects.
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