A Taiwanese official visiting Paris said on Thursday that his film promotion department would try to persuade Taiwan’s Ministry of Education to include movie courses in elementary and junior high school curriculums.
Frank Chen (陳志寬), director of the Government Information Office’s Department of Motion Pictures, said that the initiative would hopefully raise awareness of the importance of film education and foster a greater interest in movies.
“Movie culture requires cultivation at an early age,” Chen said, adding that film classes begin at elementary school level in France.
Chen is currently heading a delegation of Taiwanese theater operators on a visit to France to learn more about the European country’s film industry development, as well as digital projection technology.
He said that the French government’s policy of support for its motion picture industry could serve as a model for Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the visit helped theater operators in Chen’s delegation better understand the French attitude toward culture and re-think their own social responsibilities and the social significance of movie theaters, said Shin Kong Cineplex manager Luo Min-wen (羅敏妏), one of the members of the delegation.
She said that Taiwan’s theater operators only take box office revenue into consideration and do not care about contributing to culture.
Taiwan’s movie theaters are restricted in the selection of films available by distributors, Kuo said, in contrast to France where a wide diversity of movies are shown in cinemas.
Members of the delegation expressed the view that digital projection would become the trend of the future and that an upgrading of facilities in Taiwanese theaters would be needed.
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