The 49th Golden Horse Film Festival opened in Yilan for the first time yesterday, featuring 86 films, 15 directors and as many as 20 actors from around the world. Among the entries, Taiwanese films To My Dear Granny (親愛的奶奶), Legend of the T-Dog (命運狗不理) and Unpolitical Romance (水餃幾兩) made their world premieres at the festival, which runs until Nov. 18, the Yilan County Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau said.
Besides local productions, the festival will offer films from countries including Japan, Germany and India, the bureau said. Visitors to the festival will not only be able to enjoy films, but will also have the chance to meet renowned directors and performers after the screenings, said Cheng Wen-tang (鄭文堂), a Taiwanese director and producer who helped organize the event.
For example, Chu Yu-ning (瞿友寧), the director of the festival’s opening film, To My Dear Granny, and members of his cast yesterday evening fielded questions after the film’s premiere, while Masami Nagasawa from Japan will meet fans after the screening of her work Love Strikes on Nov. 18, Cheng said.
The bureau said a series of events would also be held in Taipei to celebrate the festival ahead of the award presentation ceremony, which will take place on Nov. 24 in Yilan. In related news, academy award-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee (李安) said on Wednesday he hoped young people in Taiwan’s film industry would benefit from working with his Hollywood crew and cast on the film Life of Pi (少年PI的奇幻漂流).
“I hope the Hollywood experience can take root and blossom here,” Lee said at a ceremony in Taipei prior to a special screening of his new film Life of Pi, which was mostly shot in Taiwan.
Saying that 3,000 people, many of them Taiwanese, were involved in the making of the film, Lee said he was “very proud of Taiwan,” which “has everything.”
“This is the most difficult film I have ever made,” the director of the award-winning Brokeback Mountain (斷背山) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching