Violence, sex and horror take star billing at Generation Horror, the newest installment of the regular POP Cinema mini-festivals. For a cult classic, film buffs could do worse than Carnival of Souls, a low-budget 1962 horror movie that focuses on a young woman caught between the realms of the living and the dead. Crime, danger and sex are voluptuously intertwined in Deadly Sweet (1967), an early work by Italian director Tinto Brass, who is most noted for his erotic films.
Other highlights include El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), Chilean-French film master Alejandro Jodorowsky’s two most celebrated films, which blend surrealism and mysticism. The festival opens today at SPOT — Taipei Film House (台北光點), 18, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市中山北路二段18號), and runs until Jan. 28. It will run from Jan. 23 to Feb. 1 at the Kaohsiung Municipal Film Archive (高雄市電影圖書館). For Taipei screenings, tickets are NT$200 (NT$170 for SPOT members) each, and books of 10 tickets are available for NT$1,800 (NT$1,500 for SPOT members). Tickets can be bought at SPOT, through NTCH ticketing outlets or online at www.artsticket.com.tw. Screenings in Kaohsiung are free. Full program details are available at www.twfilm.org/horror.
Photo courtesy of Spot – Taipei Film House
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
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