Forget Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), there are many new names in Taiwanese cinema worth noticing, few of whom are known internationally. The Taipei Factory (台北工廠) project is seeking to remedy this situation.
The Taipei Film Commission (台北市電影委員會) initiated the project in 2012 to facilitate collaborations among young talented filmmaking from home and abroad, as well as to help Taiwanese directors gain international exposure. Its debut effort, Taipei Factory I, is a joint enterprise between the commission and the organizers of Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes Film Festival, where the work had its world premiere. The feature-length film is composed of four stand-alone shorts, each pairing a Taiwanese director with a filmmaker from another country.
ITALIAN CONNECTION
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Film Commission
Taipei Factory II, the second installment completed last year and co-produced by the government commission and Italy’s Rai Cinema, comprises three 30-minute, Taipei-based shorts by a Taiwanese director and Italian actors. The film was premiered in the Out of Competition section of Venice Film Festival last year.
Singing Chen (陳芯宜), Shen Ko-shang (沈可尚), Midi Z (趙德胤) and Hou Chi-jan (侯季然) are among the highly talented filmmakers who took part in the second installment. While the goal to unite Taiwanese directors with filmmakers from around the world is inspiring, the results are uneven, with some films seeming more an experiment than finished work.
CREATIVE PLATFORM
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Film Commission
The project is probably best seen as a creative platform through which new talents from different cultures and countries meet, get inspired and create together.
Silent Asylum (沈默庇護), a pseudo-documentary co-directed by Taiwanese-Burmese filmmaker Midi Z and France’s Joana Preiss, and screened as part of Taipei Factory I, tilts toward the artsy. Weaving together the characters’ harrowing accounts of the violent oppression in Burma with Preiss reciting poetry about Hiroshima, the work has an air of gravitas, but is limited to a somewhat messy, intellectual exercise rather than conveying emotional poignancy.
A Nice Travel (美好的旅程) by Taiwan’s Shen and Chilean director Cifuentes is composed of impressionistic fragments of the life of a woman (Chu Chih-ying, 朱芷瑩), and the work is visually appealing but narratively too sporadic to form a meaningful portrait.
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Film Commission
Mr. Chang’s New Address (老張的新地址), a collaboration between Chang Jung-chi (張榮吉) and Alireza Khatami from Iran is the final chapter of the quartet and also the finest.
Filled with dark humor, the film follows a poker-faced man, magnificently played by Jack Kao (高捷), who is thrust into an existential crisis when he returns home to find that his house has all but disappeared, except for a wooden door. It is admirable how the directors tell a cleverly written allegorical story within a 15-minute time frame, that reflects upon the plight of humanity and, at the same time, is kept lively in a comic, surreal tone.
Covering different genres from thrillers to romantic comedies, Taipei Factory II brings more attention to dramatic narratives than the serious content of its predecessor. Hsieh Chun-yi’s (謝駿毅) Luca (盧卡), for example, is a well-executed character drama centering on an Italian businessman, played by Italy’s Marco Foschi, who travels to Taiwan to make funeral arrangement for his wife, who was killed in a car accident while riding a motorbike with her Taiwanese paramour.
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Film Commission
Fun and titillating, Hou Chi-jan’s The Thrill (顫慄) injects a healthy dose of homo-eroticism into the vampire genre, telling of a middle-aged taxi driver (Yu An-shun, 游安順) discovering how love/lust is highly contagious after being bitten by a handsome vampire, played by Italian actor Michele Cesari.
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Film Commission
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Film Commission
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