A cinematic retrospective of wuxia (武俠, martial arts heroes) movies started on Friday at a public film institute in New Taipei City, showcasing early movies in the martial arts subgenre.
Selected movies being shown at “Wuxia Genre in Taiwan” include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍), a swordplay film by Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee (李安) that won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards in 2001, and The Assassin (聶隱娘), which won Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015.
The selection aims to showcase how wuxia films, which first became popular in Taiwan following the release of Dragon Inn (龍門客棧) in 1967, have evolved, the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute said.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute via CNA
In addition to Dragon Inn, four other movies directed by King Hu (胡金銓), a Chinese film director and actor who was based in Hong Kong and Taiwan, would also be screened during the retrospective, which ends on April 24.
Hu, who was born in Beijing in 1932 and died in Taipei in 1997 at 64, is best known for the martial arts films he made in the 1960s and 1970s, which incorporated elements of traditional Beijing opera to create his own unique style.
Hu’s works also helped lift the Taiwanese and Hong Kong film industries to new technical and aesthetic heights, and have long influenced the films of contemporary martial arts directors such as Lee.
Wuxia movies have been unique in Chinese-language cinema, and wuxia stories in Taiwan often integrate Chinese history and Taiwanese folklore, the institute said.
Most of the 29 movies selected for the retrospective were filmed in Taiwan or with Taiwanese crews, and all but two of them would be screened at the institute in New Taipei City’s Sinjhuang District (新莊) with English subtitles.
In addition to the retrospective, an exhibition is to explore how wuxia cinema became so popular that it led to the rise of wuxia television series and radio dramas in Taiwan in the past two decades.
The exhibition is to use interactive technology to showcase exhibits in the hope of drawing younger generations to wuxia films, said the institute, which inaugurated its new offices earlier this month.
Wuxia stories often combine fantasy with reality, leading audiences into worlds of imagination, said institute director Wang Chun-chi (王君琦), who is also the cocurator of the event.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching