Many local movie fans will remember the days when queuing for days on end was the only way to ensure tickets for the Golden Horse Film Festival. Back in those winter days of the early 1990s, film fanatics would camp outside in their sleeping bags waiting at the ticket booths for advance bookings to open.
At that time, the Golden Horse was Taipei's most profitable cultural event. It didn't have to face competition from the Taipei Film Festival, Taipei Documentary Biannual, the Fanciful Film Festivals and many other new additions to the film festival calendar, which have cut into the festival's traditional audience.
This year, the organizers of the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival hope to revive the festival's position as Taiwan's largest and most important film festival. To achieve this, the Golden Horse has prepared a feast of 162 films, a series of live performances, panel discussions and a rave party to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This will be in addition to screenings of the six nominees for Best Picture during the two weeks prior to the 37th Golden Horse Awards Ceremony to be held on Dec. 2.
An indication of the quality of the two-week long movie showcase is the number of international feature films and the scope covered by the 12 special focus screenings. Particularly notable are the first public release in Taiwan of Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 work A Clockwork Orange (X-Files section); a porn actress's provocative sex journey with 251 men; (Men and Women section); movies focusing on Jazz, Cuban, techno and Chinese cabaret music (Cinema for the Ears) and Taiwanese language films from the 1960s (Director Focus).
Films with melody
Music is one of the more unconventional themes for this year's Golden Horse. One of the biggest hitters in this special focus will be the Wim Wenders' documentary Buena Vista Social Club, made in cooperation with music producer Ry Cooder. The film puts the spotlight on a group of elderly Cuban musicians, who until the film's release, had been all but forgotten. It tells their story through their recollections and music. Its nomination for the Best Documentary Film at the Oscars and Golden Globe Award has created a worldwide fervor for Cuban music. In Taiwan, the Buena Vista Social Club album has sold more than the combined sales of all other world music albums
PHOTO: COURTESY OF GOLDEN HORSE FILM FESTIVAL
distributed by Trees Music (
The film Better Living Through Circuitry, gives an obvious nod to Chemical Brothers' album Better Living through Chemistry in its title and is about club culture, electronic music, ecstasy and rave parties. Following the rhythm of break beat and techno music, the film is edited in a jerky staccato of broken light and images of clubbers and DJs' dance steps, creating a psychedelic effect.
The Music for the Ears section will also include three rarely seen Chinese musicals from the 1950s, featuring Shanghai divas Ge Lan (
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF GOLDEN HORSE FILM FESTIVAL
A dialogue with masters
Fans of cinema masters Jean-Louc Godard, Wim Wenders, Las Von Trier, Takeshi Kitano and Wong Ka-wai (
There will be a screening of Las Von Trier's award-winning film The Idiot, which will be followed -- in a separate screening -- by the documentary The Humiliated which chronicles the shooting process and Von Trier's ideas about The Idiot. The same model of feature and documentary will be used for Takeshi Kitano's 1999 Cannes-winning film Kikujiro and its documentary Jam Session and Wong Ka-wai's Happy Together with Buenos Aires Zero Degree. There will also be two self-portrait films by Jean-Louc Godard and Wim Wenders, as well as a documentary featuring former Hollywood idol Gregory Peck recalling his collaboration with Audery Hepburn in A Conversation with Gregory Peck.
Local heroes
With the passing of the Taiwan New Cinema glory days in the 1980s and the subsequent slump in the local film market in the 1990s, it is an open question whether Taiwanese films will be able to win back local audience support. The 13 films in the category called New Chinese Beat (
Among the works to be screened, Taiwan director Wu Mi-sen's (
Another feature which is likely to prove popular is Hung Chih-yu's (
Cross-strait issues have also been made the subject of one local film. Dai Tai-lung (
Lifting restrictions
This year's Golden Horse will offer local audiences an opportunity to see films long banned on the island, whether for political reasons or for provocative sex or violence. A Clockwork Orange, the Stanley Kubrick classic notable for its juxtaposition of violence and classical music, has been applying for screening permission every three years since 1971. This will be its first public screening in Taiwan.
Another special release is Catherine Breillat's Romance, a film probing issues of sexual relations. The film was banned for its explicit scenes of rape and hard-core sex. The ban on Hong Kong Director Hsu An-hua's (
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