Director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) martial arts movie The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘) will represent Taiwan in the best foreign-language film category at next year’s Oscars.
The Motion Picture and Drama Association made the decision after a meeting to select the nation’s entry for the best foreign film category at the Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture said on Wednesday.
The Assassin was selected because the film’s technical aspect was top notch, the association said.
Photo courtesy of the Golden Horse Film Festival
The film conveys a classical atmosphere and humanity through its cinematography, lighting, art direction and character modeling, the association said, adding that the movie dialogue was in classical Chinese, which exudes a unique charm.
“Director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film techniques have remained the same, but the film shows Hou’s strong ambition to create a new film language and style,” the association said.
Set in ninth-century China, the film is about a general’s daughter — Nie Yin-niang (聶隱娘) — who was trained by a nun to be an assassin from the age of 10, finding out that she has been sent to kill the man she had been promised to when she was young.
Hou won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in May for the film.
The film opened nationally on Aug. 28 and as of Monday it had grossed about NT$30 million (US$913,075), Central Pictures Corp 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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