Print

Mail

wiki links

Golden lineup

By Ho Yi
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Nov 23, 2007, Page 16

The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival's (TGHFF, 台北金馬影展) young and rebellious spirit is indefatigable. This year's themes focus on value-defying and uncompromising works by and about iconoclasts such as Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Wim Wenders and John Waters.

Todd Haynes' award-winning I'm Not There is the only biographical movie Dylan has authorized. In an unconventional twist, six actors including Cate Blanchett play the ever-elusive rebel at different stages in his life.

Women rebels in Iran fight for their right to attend sports matches in Offside, which won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was directed by Jafar Panahi. Paris-based Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi exemplifies the rising power of women in the Middle East with her animated work Persepolis. Based on her graphic autobiographical novel of the same title, the film won awards at the Cannes Film Festival.

This year's festival also picks up on recent international enthusiasm for Romanian New Wave cinema. Several of the movement's important works will screen. Chief among them are Cristian Mungiu's directorial debut West, a black comedy about young people eager to emigrate from the former Communist country, shorts Marilena de la P7 and C Block Story and California Dreamin', the first and last feature by Cristian Nemescu who was killed in a car accident last year.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival Mungiu's, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an eloquent testimony to the resurgence of Romanian cinema. While the Chinese-language and Iranian film industries were the center of attention in the 1990s, the new EU member state is now perceived as a hothouse for talented filmmakers. For those who want to know more about the rising star, Mungiu will give a lecture and attend a panel discussion as part of the festival.

Looking back at the history of Romanian cinema, there will be a retrospective program on Lucian Pintilie, who began his directing career in 1960s and whose works lay bare the social and political predicaments faced by citizens under the Communist regime.

Other films in this year's festival come from Southeast Asia, an area often overlooked by art-house moviegoers who favor Western aesthetics. This year shines the spotlight on new films from Thailand, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. Festival organizers hope to show audiences, filmmakers and producers the region's successful commercial filmmaking, which includes developed technical departments, mature star systems and big capital.

Horror flick The Unseeable, suspense thriller Dead Time: Kala and action-filled The Rebel are examples of Malaysian director Yasmin Ahmad's work. With a nod to indie filmmaking, she tackles the themes of love, religion, sexuality and identity in the multicultural and multiethnic Malaysian society.

There is also a wide selection of hard-to-come-by art house films. Hungarian Bela Tarr's latest work, The Man From London, received polarized reviews at Cannes over his elimination of dramatic elements and indulgence in poetic shots completed with refined mise-en-scene and composition.

Six years after his disturbing feature debut Dog Days, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl takes a precise and poignant look at global migration in Import/Export, told through his improvisational, documentary-style filmmaking.

Religion has been accorded a slot at this year's festival. Cannes-winning Silent Light by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas will show. Russian soul, as revealed with lucidity by the cinematic great Andrei Tarkovsky, sees a lyrical revival in The Banishment by Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose first film The Return won the Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival.

Promising young blood in the world of cinema can be found in the international digital shorts competition. Twenty-seven works, selected from 785 entries, probe the digital realm inhabited by the weird, subversive and fantastical.

Section highlights include Annecy International Animation Festival winner, The Pearce Sisters, a black comedy on sisterhood in 2D and 3D animation; Machine from Spain, which tells a dark, disturbing tale about a woman's transformation after being violated; and Ark, a Polish computer-generated animated work about the remaining human population's search for an uninhabited land after a devastating epidemic.

Local talent

Turning to Taiwanese cinema, talented female director Singing Chen (陳芯宜) applies magical realism to a biting study on a society in chaos in God Man Dog (流浪神狗人), which follows several parallel story lines. Taking on the imaginary, local directors are beginning to explore fantasia flicks. Brotherhood of Legio (神選者) by Aozaru Shiao (蕭力修) takes cues from video games to portray five young people's adventure in a game of survival.

Nominated for the best feature film at this year's Golden Horse Awards, actor-turned-director Doze Niu's (鈕承澤) debut, What On Earth Have I Done Wrong?! (情非得已之生存之道), is a mockumentary about a filmmaker's project to record his political fantasies.

Several retrospectives pay tribute to Taiwanese filmmakers. One commemorates the recent passing of Edward Yang (楊德昌), a leading Taiwanese New Wave filmmaker. The must-sees of the collection are the four-hour director's cut of A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件) and Yang's last work Yi Yi: A One and a Two (一一), which premiered seven years after its completion.

Others mark the 10th anniversary of the deaths of director and Golden Horse Award-winner Richard Li Han-hsiang (李翰祥) and King Hu (胡金銓), a filmmaker of the Shaw Brothers era. The section on Hu features the director's martial-arts classics that mix elements from dance, music and theater while the Li retrospective will screen At Dawn (破曉時分) and The Winter (冬暖), two of the top 10 movies in Taiwanese film history.

All three masters' film manuscripts, hand drawings and family and production photographs have been assembled for a rare exhibition at Shin Kong Museum (新光美術館) on Dunhua South Road (敦化南路) that runs through the end of next month.

Panel discussions by film critics and professionals from home and abroad will also be held during the period of the festival.

This story has been viewed 1030 times.