Oscar-winning film director Ang Lee (李安) yesterday continued his critique of Taiwan’s movie industry, saying that its ability to compete internationally has been hampered by several deficiencies.
He said the two dozen movies produced by Taiwan each year tend to be narrow in scope, with themes that are not well developed.
The films are also not structured well, and their dialogue often “lacks nutrients,” he said during a public chat with Yu Kwang-chung (余光中), a poet and English professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in Greater Kaohsiung.
He would “love to fall in love with Taiwanese movies, but it’s been difficult to get excited” about them, said the Taiwanese-born director, who has become the most recognizable filmmaker the country has ever produced.
By contrast, he said, jurors found it difficult not to cast their vote for Ilo Ilo, a small production from Singapore that was the major winner at the Golden Horse Awards ceremony on Saturday.
Lee has previously described Taiwanese movies as “lacking in scope and strength,” but he said yesterday that “you don’t have to shoot a historic epic to have scope,” stressing that the most important element is the development of the theme.
“You just have to manage your subject in a way so that it can touch the audience deeply,” he said. “That’s want I meant by scope.”
Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) said she believed Taiwan was not lacking in ideas or originality, but said she felt there were problems in certain parts of the movie industry.
She cited special effects, post-production and capital as the areas that need more work.
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
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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