As any good entrepreneur will tell you, there is always an opportunity in any business downturn.
This is how the Asian motion picture business appears to be sizing up its prospects, a result of the economic storm that has swept through the world film industry over the last 18 months, hitting Hollywood particularly hard.
With signs of a strong domestic movie market driven by a homegrown product, the Asian movie business continues to grow in international stature spurred on by the digital revolution and Hollywood remakes of Asian film hits.
“Now we have the confidence to compete with Hollywood,” said Jennifer Jao (饒紫娟), director of the Taipei Film Commission.
“The popularity of US movies has declined,” said Kenta Fudesaka from Japan’s film industry group Unijapan. “Maybe we are waiting for a new
star like Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise
to emerge.”
The big batch of films from Asian directors that have been included in Cannes’ main lineup, including Taiwan-born Ang Lee’s (李安) homage to the 1969 US music festival Woodstock and Taiwan-based art house moviemaker Tsai Ming-liang’s (蔡明亮) film about making a movie about Salome, helped to underpin that confidence.
Also in the 20-movie race for the festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or award are Chinese director Lou Ye’s (婁燁) tale of desire in Spring Fever (春風沉醉的夜晚) and Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s gangland story in Kinatay.
In addition there is legendary Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s (杜琪峰) revenge thriller Vengeance (復仇), that also helped to mark 100 years of Hong Kong cinema.
Buoyant national film markets and international film festival recognition means that large parts of the Asian movie business have managed to escape the fall-out from the current economic downturn, unlike Hollywood, which emerged from a major industrial showdown with scriptwriters only to be engulfed by the global financial crisis.
“It is a good chance for us,” Jao said, as Taiwan’s movie business slowly gains ground and the nation’s film companies have so far avoided making big job cuts.
In 2005, Taiwan-made films accounted for less than 2 percent of the national box office. But by last year their hold on the market had grown to more than 12 percent.
The same is true of Japan. Despite the global recession having sent the Japanese economy spiraling downward, the nation’s movie business still appears in relatively good shape.
A strong domestic box office, film festival success and a big move by Japanese television companies into movie production helped to underpin the Japanese movie industry.
“They want to make commercial films,” Fudesaka said.
One exception to the upbeat mood in the Asian cinema industry appears to be the Korean film sector, which is still battling to emerge from a crisis, which came in the wake of too many films being produced, ballooning movie budgets, piracy and illegal downloads combined with concerns about the falling quality of the nation’s movies.
In the meantime, the percentage of Korean movies in the Korean market slipped to 42.1 percent last year.
“It is still not in good shape,” said Han Sang-hee from the Korean Film Council (KOFIC).
But progress is being made. About 113 movies were made last year compared to 124 in 2007.
Nevertheless, underscoring Korea’s emergence in recent years as a major new Asian movie powerhouse, the nation has a raft of films screening in this year’s Cannes.
The lineup includes veteran Korean director Park Chan-Wook, whose tale about a priest-turned-vampire, Breath, is in the race for the festival’s top honor, the Palme d’Or.
At the same time, the crisis has meant that low-budget independent moviemaking appears to have come to life in Korea with a documentary about an aging farmer’s relationship with his ox becoming a surprise hit.
To be sure, it can take just one film hit to give the national box office a big push. In Taiwan it was the success of Ang’s Lust, Caution (色，戒), which is set in 1930s Shanghai.
“Lust, Caution brought film back to Taiwan,” Jao said. This success was followed up by Cape Number 7 (海角七號) last year. A sentimental movie, Cape Number 7 scored a box-office record.
Taiwan is also keen to ensure that the potential of the vast Chinese-language film market encompassing China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore is fully realized.
“Co-productions could be another way to make people come back to the movies,” said Jao, as Taiwan plans to increase the number of co-productions with China to 10 a year.
In the meantime, a special Chinese-backed US$150 million fund to promote Chinese movies was announced in Cannes on Monday.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
President William Lai (賴清德) on Nov. 25 last year announced in a Washington Post op-ed that “my government will introduce a historic US$40 billion supplementary defense budget, an investment that underscores our commitment to defending Taiwan’s democracy.” Lai promised “significant new arms acquisitions from the United States” and to “invest in cutting-edge technologies and expand Taiwan’s defense industrial base,” to “bolster deterrence by inserting greater costs and uncertainties into Beijing’s decision-making on the use of force.” Announcing it in the Washington Post was a strategic gamble, both geopolitically and domestically, with Taiwan’s international credibility at stake. But Lai’s message was exactly
RSS