Chinese is becoming the lingua franca of Lido Island in Venice, Italy. No less than five Chinese-language films are screening at the 59th Mostra Internazionale de Arte Cinematografica, or Venice Film Festival, which will take place from Aug. 29 to Sept. 8. Two of the five are from Taiwanese filmmakers.
The Best of Times (美麗時光), by Taiwan's own Chang Tso-chi (張作驥), is the only Chinese-language film selected to compete for the festival's highest prize, the Golden Lion. Hong Kong filmmaker and frequent guest at Venice, Fruit Chan (陳果), who last year brought his Hong Kong Hollywood, and Durian Durian (榴槤飄飄) the year before, this year brings his digital film Public Toilet to screen in the festival's Against the Mainstream section. In that same section are Chinese filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang's (田壯壯) 1930s drama Springtime in a Small Town (小城之春), and Missing Gun (尋槍) by China's Lu Chuan (陸川).
Cheng Wen-tang (
The festival's new artistic director, Moritz de Hadeln, announced the line-up of participating films last week. The opening film will be Julie Taymor's Frida, about the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, played by Salma Hayek, whose life was closely intertwined with Central American history. Also in the competition are Steven Soderbergh's latest feature, Full Frontal, Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game and Japanese director Takeshi Kitano's Doll.
Adding to the festival's Chinese attributes, festival organizers earlier announced that Chinese actress Gong Li (鞏俐) will serve as the jury chairperson, after leading the judges in Berlin in 2000 and at Cannes in 1997.
Filmmakers from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China are no strangers to the Golden Lion. In 1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien's (侯孝賢) City of Sadness (悲情城市), an epic about the 228 incident, was the first Taiwanese film to win the award. Then in 1994, Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) walked away with the Golden Lion for his second feature, Vive L'Amour (愛情萬歲). Chinese director Zhang Yi-mou (張藝謀) took the award in 1999 for Not One Less (一個都不能少).
Chinese film fever seemed to take a rest last year, winning fewer awards and garnering smaller attention at major film festivals. But Chang's The Best of Times is now taking the lead to create further international hype for Chinese-language films.
Chang, winner of the 2000 Tokyo Film Festival for his Darkness and Light (黑暗之光), is known for his stories of people living at the fringe of the society. Ah-Chung tells the story of disaffected youth living in a shantytown outside Taipei and Darkness centers around blind characters. The Best of Times has been praised by critics in Taiwan as Chang's best work. The story revolves around two teenage boys from troubled families who frequent a fetid sewer near their homes.
Films about people at the fringe of society sounds like a familiar topic for many Taiwanese films, following Hou's style of social realism. But in Chang's films there is always another layer under the truthfulness; a strong romanticism, almost surreal in the humble lives of his characters. Exciting gang-fights are juxtaposed against the sentimental lights and shadows of the corner of a rainy day, sunsets by the sewer and the beautiful coral reefs where the two boys swim. And by the bed of a girl suffering from Leukemia there appears a unicorn. "Magical realism" could be used to describe the power behind the story. The Best of Times is Chang's third feature and his best chance yet competing against the likes of Kitano and Soderbergh.
Another Taiwanese entry, Cheng Wen-tang's Somewhere Over the Dreamland is a story about two Aboriginal men having different adventures in urban Taipei. One has mysterious dreams about his lost wallet and rice field. The other, a worker at a Japanese restaurant, always kills time at phone sex games, meets with a bizarre girl who tells him about a dream involving a rice field.
Cheng began movie-making in 1996. The film is his second feature film.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a