It is not an overstatement to say French filmmaker Franck Guerin is crazy about Taipei.
The 38-year-old first visited the nation’s capital in 2006 to promote his debut feature, A Summer Day. Five years later, he has come back to promote his second feature, One O One, a 90-minute film that is set half in Taipei and half in a mountain village in France.
“I can’t really explain it. I fell in love with Taipei the first time I was here and I felt it was a promise to come back and shoot here,” Guerin told reporters on Monday in an interview.
He said he was surprised to find that Taipei can be very crowded but peaceful at the same time.
“One can stay in the city for a very long time and yet it does not feel like time is passing by,” he said.
Guerin said he has traveled to many countries in Southeast Asia, but he is most impressed by Taipei. After returning to France in 2006, he said he had the idea of shooting a film in Taipei.
Without a script or financial support, Guerin, cinematographer Mathieu Pansard and the main actor in One O One, Yann Peira, began shooting in the mountains in Ardeche, France. In October 2008, the threesome flew to Taiwan and started filming here.
He used Facebook to recruit a Taiwanese film crew and found the ideal female protagonist for the movie — actress Wang Xian-han (王湘涵).
“Wang is a great actress. She is so involved in the project,” Guerin said.
One O One is a story about a man named Abbas who searches for a young French girl that disappeared years ago. The only clue Abbas has of the girl’s whereabouts is a drawing of the Taipei 101 skyscraper.
The film is divided into the vivid, poetic imagery and memories of Abbas’ life in the mountains of France and his encounter with a Taiwanese woman called Lian, who knows Abbas does not love her.
Several iconic landscapes of Taipei are filmed and the first and final scenes of the movie are set at Taipei Railway Station.
The director said he spent 1 million euros (US$1.4 million) on the film and faces a debt of 900,000 euros. He said he was very thankful for the moral support given by his investors. They have not asked him to immediately pay back the loans.
The film had its world premiere at the Taipei Film Festival on Friday and is expected to be released in France in January or February next year.
Guerin is still looking for distributors so that his film can reach a wider audience.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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