Burmese-Chinese director Midi Z’s (趙德胤) film Ice Poison (冰毒), which won a best film award at the 68th Edinburgh International Film Festival last week, is scheduled to open in Taiwan on July 18.
A premiere will be held on July 9 during the Taipei Film Festival, distributor Flash Forward Entertainment said yesterday.
Ice Poison was the first Taiwanese-produced movie to win the Scottish festival’s Best International Feature Film award.
The film, shot in Myanmar, charts the economic despair in the rural and developing parts of that country.
It is set is Lashio, a market town with a large ethnic Chinese population in Shan State, and centers on a poor farmer who is lured into selling crystal meth, which is called “ice poison” in Chinese.
On Monday, the Ministry of Culture gave a NT$100,000 cash prize to Midi Z and his film crew, who are all Taiwanese, for winning the award.
The 32-year-old director, who moved from Myanmar to Taiwan at the age of 16, said he could not imagine what he would be doing now had he not come to Taiwan.
He said the nation’s free and open society has helped his filmmaking, and renowned Taiwanese directors such as Ang Lee (李安) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) have influenced his work.
Midi Z studied film direction at a Taiwanese university and produced his first short film Paloma Blanca as part of his work for his degree in 2006. The film was screened at numerous film festivals around the world.
In 2009, he was selected to become a member of the first Taipei Golden Horse Film Academy, which allows young filmmakers to interact with each other and learn from accomplished directors.
A short film that he released that year, Hua-Xing Incident, was produced by Hou.
Since then, Midi Z has made three feature films, including Return to Burma, released in 2011, and Poor Folk, released in 2012, as well as the shorts Motorcycle Drive (2008) and last year’s The Palace on the Sea.
Return to Burma was selected to compete in the New Currents section at the 2011 Busan International Film Festival.
Additional reporting by staff reporter
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