This year’s Taiwan Film Festival in Australia is scheduled to run from July 25 to Sept. 14, and is to feature movies ranging from blockbusters to arthouse cinema, as well as Taiwanese indigenous works for the first time, event organizers said.
“This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase Taiwanese indigenous cultures and highlight their values and voices, which are crucial to Taiwanese identity,” festival director Benson Wu (吳耀祖) said, adding that he expects the scenes of Taiwan’s landscape to impress audiences.
The movie Old Fox, directed by Hsiao Ya-chuan (蕭雅全) and produced by renowned Taiwanese directer Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), is to open this year’s festival, as it makes its Australian premiere.
Photo courtesy of the festival via CNA
Set in 1980s Taiwan, the award-winning film depicts the nostalgia of the era’s economic optimism and explores the balance between the pursuit of wealth and happiness in Taiwan’s working class.
The film won four Golden Horse Awards last year: Best Director, Best Original Film Score, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Makeup and Costume Design.
Hsiao is also to attend the premiere and an additional behind-the-scenes book talk at Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya on July 26.
Meanwhile, indigenous works include The Woman Carrying the Prey, a documentary by Truku director Rngrang Hungul, which follows the journey of Heydi Mijung, a Truku woman who is the only female hunter in her tribe.
The other indigenous films explore the cultures of the Atayal, Bunun, Puyuma and Paiwan peoples.
There would also be a script pitching competition, another first in festival history, which gives aspiring filmmakers an opportunity for international coproductions.
Participants can choose from five Taiwanese literary works previously promoted at the festival’s “Taiwanese Bookshelves” event, which showcases Taiwanese literature to Australian audiences, and adapt them into short film scripts.
The competition aims to inspire more outstanding Taiwanese literary film and television works, and those selected are to receive a cash prize of A$5,000 (US$3,343) to start the production of their adaptations, event organizers said.
So far, the selected books include The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-yi (吳明益) and Dailygreen’s (每日青菜) comics Day Off.
The film festival is to span six cities: Sydney (July 25 to Sept. 14), Canberra (Aug. 2 to 4), Brisbane (Aug. 10 to 11), Hobart (Aug. 23 to 25), Melbourne (Sept. 5 to 12) and, for the first time, Adelaide (Aug. 30 to Sept. 1).
“The Taiwan Film Festival in Australia is an annual film festival event to provide a professional showcase platform for Taiwanese and Asian Australian filmmakers to promote their works in Australia,” the event’s Web site says.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS