"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.
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong ship, Shunxin-39, was identified as the ship that had cut telecom cables on the seabed north of Keelung. The ship, owned out of Hong Kong and variously described as registered in Cameroon (as Shunxin-39) and Tanzania (as Xinshun-39), was originally People’s Republic of China (PRC)-flagged, but changed registries in 2024, according to Maritime Executive magazine. The Financial Times published tracking data for the ship showing it crossing a number of undersea cables off northern Taiwan over the course of several days. The intent was clear. Shunxin-39, which according to the Taiwan Coast Guard was crewed
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
On Sept. 27 last year, three climate activists were arrested for throwing soup over Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery. The Just Stop Oil protest landed on international front pages. But will the action help further the activists’ cause to end fossil fuels? Scientists are beginning to find answers to this question. The number of protests more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 and researchers are working out which tactics are most likely to change public opinion, influence voting behavior, change policy or even overthrow political regimes. “We are experiencing the largest wave of protests in documented history,” says
One way people in Taiwan can control how they are represented is through their choice of name. Culturally, it is not uncommon for people to choose their own names and change their identification cards and passports to reflect the change, though only recently was the right to use Indigenous names written using letters allowed. Reasons for changing a person’s name can vary widely, from wanting to sound more literary, to changing a poor choice made by their parents or, as 331 people did in March of 2021, to get free sushi by legally changing their name to include the two characters
RSS