Taiwanese filmmaker Hsiao Ya-chuan (
Hsiao is known as one of the best young filmmakers in Taiwan and has taken a large step in broadening his recognition abroad with Mirror Image which was shown in the Directors' Fortnight portion of the Cannes festival.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HSIAO YA-CHUAN
Mirror Image will compete for the Camera d'Or, a prize for first-time feature film directors. And on Saturday Hsiao was awarded the festival's youth award issued by a panel of seven French film critics to recognize films that represent young people's lives and stories.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HSIAO YA-CHUAN
Hsiao has also received funds and promotion plans for Mirror Image and his next two filmmaking projects from French film companies. Celluloid Dreams, which has distributed Tsai Ming-liang's (
Mirror Image involves a game of flirtation between a man and two women in Taipei, each of whom is trying to manipulate the others' fate and lives. Shot in a playful, humorous style with jazzy background music, the story focuses on the main character Tung-chin's (
Tung-chin was recently in a car accident which left him with a scratched palm and was told later by his nurse that without a lifeline on his palm he was now in control of his own fate, something which he has come to believe quite strongly.
Eiko, Tung-chin's girlfriend, is an avid palm reader who hangs out at the pawnshop. The two of them use different ploys to get prints of customers' palms. But the palm lines that Eiko is most interested in is Tung-chin's. She wants to know more about his future. Meanwhile, Tung-chin begins an affair with a female customer named Xiao De-le (
"I think Tung-chin has fooled himself," Hsiao said at a press conference at Cannes last week. "For me a lifeline is meant to be a limit to one's life. And losing his lifeline makes Tung-chin believe in a false idea that he has broken the limits," he said.
"So he is like a guinea pig that I created for my experiment, who in the end reverts back to his original limits, back to an ordinary life."
"This is also true for the two girls, who tried to break free of control in their own different ways but find themselves trapped by their own limits that they set up."
The playful environment that Hsiao portrays in his film through his camera work and humorous story was also a hot topic of discussion at the festival.
"Before I start shooting, I usually have the rhythm and structure of the images in my mind, which I perceive as important elements in my film," Hsiao said.
For Peggy Chiao (
Hou is in fact one of the producers of Mirror Image. Hsiao was previously a student of Hou's and worked as deputy director on Hou's Shanghai Flowers (
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS