Taiwan's A Fish with a Smile (微笑的魚) garnered another international award, winning the Special Prize of the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk for best short film at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival, which was held from Feb. 9 to 19.
Directed by Jay Shih (
A Fish with a Smile is based on renowned Taiwanese illustrator Jimmy Liao's (
This short animation is a heart-warming story about a lonely man who finds solace and fulfilment in his pet fish. It explores the inner world of a character who is blessed with a tender and extraordinarily generous character.
The film was produced by a young animation company, Original Design and Development Incredible Inc, which was founded in May 2003.
Other Asian winners at the Berlin Festival included Hong Kong director Pang Ho-cheung's (
The only other East Asian film in the main competition, Invisible Waves, a Dutch, Thai and Hong Kong co-produced thriller, failed to garner any award during the ceremony in Berlin on Saturday.
The composer of Isabella, Peter Kam, said he took a minimalist approach in writing the score.
"I liked using a lot of music, very noisy music in my past movie scores ... because we wanted the atmosphere to be stronger and more obvious. What's different about this movie is, director Pang and I tried to use less music because we wanted to let the actors act," he told Sina.com in an interview on its Chinese-language news Web site.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods