The Cannes Film Festival has corrected the nationality of film director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) from China to “Taiwan” and promised to display the Republic of China (ROC) flag at the event, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Anna Kao (高安) said yesterday.
Representative to France Michel Lu (呂慶龍) began negotiating with the organizer of the Cannes Film Festival immediately after it was discovered that Hou was labeled as a film director of “Chinese nationality” in its festival brochure and on its official Web site, and the ROC flag was not displayed among those representing the countries the films are from, Kao said.
The organizer responded to Taiwan’s complaints by declaring that Hou is from “Taiwan” on its Web site, distributing erratum sheets to rectify the mistake in its brochure, and having the ROC flag hung at the Film Market event, Kao said. It also promised the ROC flag would be displayed at the film festival event scheduled to open this evening, Kao said.
Hou is at the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival in Paris with his martial arts epic The Assassin (聶隱娘), which is among 17 films vying for the festival’s highest prize, the Palme d’Or.
The film is based on an ancient Tang Dynasty story of a woman who is adopted and trained by nuns as a political assassin. It has been eight years since Hou’s feature Flight of the Red Balloon (紅氣球) was shown in Cannes in 2007.
In the original brochure, Hou was mistakenly described as a director of Chinese nationality, the same way Chinese director Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯) was listed.
Lu told the Central News Agency in Paris that, in the letter of protest to the organizer, he demanded the nationality of Hou be corrected, because Hou is Taiwanese, and that Taiwan be accorded the same treatment as other participants.
The ROC flag had been hung at the venue during the festival in the past and that precedent should be followed again this year, Lu 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:
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