The film Emma's Bliss by German director Sven Toddicken won the US$30,000 Grand Prize at the 2007 Taipei Film Festival last Friday.
A representative from the German Cultural Center received the award on behalf of Toddicken as the director could not attend the award-presenting ceremony.
"I was working on my film scripts when I was told I had won the prize. Though I cannot go to Taipei, I will celebrate it with some friends in a Berlin bar. I hope the Taiwan audience like my film," Toddicken told the film festival's organizer by phone.
PHOTO: AP
Emma's Bliss is about the loneliness of a pig farmer, Emma, in Mexico. The jury lauded the film for portraying Emma's character and bringing the audience into Emma's inner world.
Pure Hearts by Denmark's director Kenneth Kainz and Don't Look Back by South Korean director Kim Young-nam won the Audience's Choice Prize and Jury' Prize.
The 9th Taipei Film Festival opened on June 22. Nearly 200 films from around the world were screened during the festival and a dozen were nominated for the New Talent Award section, which was open to foreign films.
Far from opening old wounds, Nanking (南京), a film documenting accounts of war-time atrocities by Japanese troops in China, should help the frosty Asian neighbors overcome historical differences, the filmmakers say.
"Predominantly, this is an anti-war movie, not an anti-Japanese movie," the movie's producer and AOL vice-chairman Ted Leonsis said in an interview on Wednesday, a day after the film's Beijing premiere.
"My ultimate goal was to make a film that activated a lot of discussion ... that these activities happened 70 years ago - that two great countries and two great people - they should acknowledge what happened and they should move on together in friendship," Leonsis said at a press conference.
US-made Nanking is one of a clutch of movies about the Nanjing Massacre to be released this year in the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of the fall of China's war-time capital to invading Japanese troops on Dec. 13, 1937.
Described as a Schindler's List-style movie about Westerners setting up a safe zone for refugees in the war-torn city, the film weaves grainy images of stacked bodies of infants with tearful accounts of rape and torture committed by Japanese soldiers from Chinese witnesses.
Hollywood actors, including Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, do staged readings of diary entries kept by the Westerners in the safe zone, and retired Japanese troops confess to participating in mass killings.
China says Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 civilians in Nanjing. An Allied tribunal after World War II put the death toll at about 142,000. Some Japanese historians say the numbers are exaggerated, estimating as few as 20,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.
Other testy neighborly relations have put paid to Oliver Stone's planned documentary on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The Middle Eastern leader has rejected a proposal by American the Oscar winning movie director to make a film about him because Stone is part the "Great Satan'' cultural establishment, a semiofficial news agency reported.
"I sent a negative answer by Ahmadinejad to Oliver Stone,'' the Fars agency quoted Mehdi Kalhor, media adviser to the president, as saying Sunday. "It is right that this person is considered part of the opposition in the US, but opposition in the US is a part of the Great Satan.'' The term the "Great Satan'' dates back to Iran's late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who first called the US the Great Satan after 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran and the US have not had diplomatic relations since Washington cut its ties with Tehran after Iranian militant students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Stone was not the only major Hollywood director to be rejected this week.
Tom Cruise, still smarting from a rejection by the German Defence Ministry, has now had his film crew barred from an ornate red-brick Berlin police station, capital-city police confirmed Monday.
While German politicians have said that Cruise, 44, is unwelcome because of his promotion of Scientology beliefs, the police said it was purely concerned that a film crew on the pre-war site would hamper police coming and going.
Cruise's German film team applied to film on location at the police station and yard for Precinct 52 in the city's Kreuzberg neighborhood, but police said this would obstruct the various departments working on the site.
Cruise is directing a movie, Valkyrie, about a true plot to blow up Adolf Hitler in 1944. The time-bomb exploded but a table deflected the blast and Hitler was only injured.
Cruise will play Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic German officer who led the plot, was instantly executed and hailed later as a hero.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
RSS