"Taiwan is desperately lacking film producers!" said Peter Chan, Carrie Wong, and also Hunag Yu-shang (黃玉珊), a chairperson of the Kaohsiung Film Festival. This sentiment was prevalent at the Forum on Film Coproduction and International Promotion for Asian Films among those representatives of what passes for Taiwan's film industry.
"A producer is very important in the sense that he is the true person to bridge the dream world of the directors and the business world of the investors," said Peter Chan.
A big portion of the international forum was in fact an introductory session for local filmmakers to understand the work process for financing a coproduction, especially one with a budget bigger than US$10 million.
Philip Lee, associate producer of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is now line-producer for Zhang Yimou's (張藝謀) US$30 million film, Hero (英雄). He emphasized the importance of Completion Bond Companies, a form of coporation that can help projects such as Crouching Tiger get bank funding more easily.
Peter Anshin from Wincom Enterprise, the Asian representative of Comerica Entertainment Group, a financial organization specializing in the entertainment industry, was invited to explain the principle and basic requirements for the group to finance a film. The group had also expressed willingness and interest to provide banking services for Asian film projects.
But the reaction from local film busineses was a little cool. Only a few film distribution companies such as ERA group and Spring International had sent their delegates to the forum. Neither of these firms have put forward projects for investment.
At the moment, Peggy Chiao (焦雄屏), with her Arc Light, and Hsu Li-kong (徐立功), with his Zoom Hunt, are probably the only Taiwanese producers with an international reputation. The former successfully brought Beijing Bicycle (十七歲的單車) to Europe and the US market, where it was distributed by Pyramid and Sony respectively. Zoom Hunt was the producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The fast withering domestic market for Taiwanese films is the result of the lack of film producers and investors in Taiwan. The market share of Chinese-language films in Taiwan was only 1.6 percent for the year 2001.
On a harsh winter afternoon last month, 2,000 protesters marched and chanted slogans such as “CCP out” and “Korea for Koreans” in Seoul’s popular Gangnam District. Participants — mostly students — wore caps printed with the Chinese characters for “exterminate communism” (滅共) and held banners reading “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communist Party” (天滅中共). During the march, Park Jun-young, the leader of the protest organizer “Free University,” a conservative youth movement, who was on a hunger strike, collapsed after delivering a speech in sub-zero temperatures and was later hospitalized. Several protesters shaved their heads at the end of the demonstration. A
The term “pirates” as used in Asia was a European term that, as scholar of Asian pirate history Robert J. Antony has observed, became globalized during the European colonial era. Indeed, European colonial administrators often contemptuously dismissed entire Asian peoples or polities as “pirates,” a term that in practice meant raiders not sanctioned by any European state. For example, an image of the American punitive action against the indigenous people in 1867 was styled in Harper’s Weekly as “Attack of United States Marines and Sailors on the pirates of the island of Formosa, East Indies.” The status of such raiders in
As much as I’m a mountain person, I have to admit that the ocean has a singular power to clear my head. The rhythmic push and pull of the waves is profoundly restorative. I’ve found that fixing my gaze on the horizon quickly shifts my mental gearbox into neutral. I’m not alone in savoring this kind of natural therapy, of course. Several locations along Taiwan’s coast — Shalun Beach (沙崙海水浴場) near Tamsui and Cisingtan (七星潭) in Hualien are two of the most famous — regularly draw crowds of sightseers. If you want to contemplate the vastness of the ocean in true
On paper, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) enters this year’s nine-in-one elections with almost nowhere to go but up. Yet, there are fears in the pan-green camp that they may not do much better then they did in 2022. Though the DPP did somewhat better at the city and county councillor level in 2022, at the “big six” municipality mayoral and county commissioner level, it was a disaster for the party. Then-president and party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made a string of serious strategic miscalculations that led to the party’s worst-ever result at the top executive level. That year, the party
RSS