Island Etude (練習曲) is En Chen's (陳懷恩) feature debut. En is a veteran cinematographer who has worked with acclaimed directors such as Hou, Chang Tso-chi (張作驥) and Cheng Wen-tang (鄭文堂) since the 1980s and is a child of Taiwan's New Wave cinema.
A road movie about a hearing-impaired college student who encounters various people and their stories during his seven-day, round-the-island bike trip, Island Etude preserves some of the New Wave look and spirit, focusing on the island and its people and presenting a miniature Taiwan on which people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds all have their own stories to tell in the multicultural society.
The emergence of this new generation of filmmakers signals a break from the past. While the 1980s saw the rise of leading figures Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang (楊德昌) and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) in 1990s, local filmmakers in the new Millennium now choose to embrace the audience, planning ahead their marketing strategies which are now seen as important as the works themselves.
In the view of film scholar, critic and curator Wen Tien-hsiang (聞天祥), these young directors are in their nascent phase and are learning how to tell a good story that can move audiences.
"I think we must understand that it is not the art-house cinema that ruins Taiwan's film industry, but rather outdated commercial films that failed to update themselves to meet new demands. Today's young directors are just beginning to fill in the gap and we should give them more time to do what they have been doing," Wen said.
For director Wu, the problems the local film industry face cannot be solved within the industry itself since to talk about the issue, one needs to take into consideration the wider cultural context.
"The issue at stake here is not as simple as solving the film industry's problems by bringing out several young directors for example. It concerns our cultural identity and quality. Western countries spent a long time completing their modernization projects, while Taiwan was forced to compress the whole process within decades and there are certainly lots of stuff being skipped and missed along the way," Wu said.
So when the restless press, film companies and government agents anxiously look for the next Ang Lee (李安), maybe we should take it easy on the emerging young directors and let them pick up what has been left and bypassed at their own pace.
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