Taiwan

Quote:
High school student Miao Miao (Ke Jia-Yan) is Chinese and has transferred to Taipei for one special school year. Her quiet demeanor and awkward prettiness make her immediately attractive to classmates and strangers, but it’s the sassy Xiao-Ai (Sandrine Pinna) who cracks her shell. The two become fast friends, palling around after school and in class, where Miao Miao’s baking skills make her a hit with her classmates. However, Miao Miao finds first love when she falls for sullen CD shop owner Chen Fei, who’s forever shutting out the world with a pair of headphones.Read More »

Quote:
Based on an 1894 novel by Han Ziyun, and starring Hong Kong film and recording star Tony Leung, Hou’s first film set outside of Taiwan takes place in the elegant brothels of late nineteenth-century Shanghai, a hermetic world with its own highly ritualized codes of behavior. It traces the destinies of the beautiful “flower girls”, whose lives depended on their ability to win, and then hold, the affections of their wealthy callers. A mesmerizing and seductive tale of sexual intrigue.Read More »

Synopsis:
During the Yuan Dynasty, a band of Han rebels in disguise converge at an inn out in a desolate Western province to await the arrival of Mongol warlord Lee Khan in order to intercept the delivery of a military war map.Read More »

Quote:
Filmmaker Ming-liang Tsai sits with Lee Kang-sheng in a house as they have a discussion.

Quote:
This conversation between Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang and his muse Lee Kang-sheng illuminates one of the great actor-director collaborations in cinema history.Read More »

Quote:
Recent Taiwanese cinema has almost had a monopoly on the kind of angst that permeated so many European art films of the 1960’s. The anomie that envelops Lin Cheng-sheng’s ”Murmur of Youth” in a mist of melancholy has everything to do with the collision of traditional and modern values in a boom economy. The film follows two college-age girls, both named Mei-li, from different backgrounds, who end up working side by side as ticket takers in a movie theater in a teeming shopping arcade.Read More »

Quote:
Small Talk is a 2016 Taiwanese documentary feature film in which the director Huang Hui-chen attempts to reveal and reconcile a painful past shared between herself and her mother A-nu, a lesbian Taoist priestess.Read More »

Synopsis
A down and out man and his daughter live in an illegal hovel. The two live a happy peaceful life until the authorities intervene when the child reaches school age.Read More »

Director Wu Nien-Jen’s autobiographical portrait of his father and the family conflict that develops around him, set against the background of dramatic political change in Taiwan.

Sega, a coal-miner who grew up in the years of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, is more strongly attracted to Japanese identity and culture than to the Mainland Chinese model imposed after the Kuomintang takeover in 1945. His son Wen-Jian on the other hand, typically for his generation, has a natural allegiance to Chinese culture. He is baffled by and impatient with his father’s fondness for the Japanese, a bafflement intensified by the harshly negative portrayal of Japanese imperialist ambitions and wartime atrocities he is exposed to at school.Read More »

Daw Ming Lee, The Historical Dictionary of Taiwan Cinema:
King Hu’s next film was a portmanteau film,The Wheel of Life/Da lunhui (1983), in which he once again codirected with Lee Hsing and Pai Chingjui, as he did in Four Moods. The Wheel of Life revolves around romance between two men and a woman that repeats itself in several generations. Hu was responsible for the story of the first generation, set in the Ming dynasty that he was most familiar with. It is an intriguing romantic story involving a secret service agent, the daughter of the governor, and the leader of the antigovernment army who is plotting vengeance. Hu directed the episode well. This film, too, failed at the box office.Read More »