In 2006, something seemed different about the market for Taiwanese films.
In 2003, the three Taiwanese films with the highest ticket sales in Taipei were attended by only around 20,000 moviegoers. By 2006, these numbers had gone up by more than five and a half times, to more than 130,000 people, with audiences reaching a five-year high. These numbers may not look like much next to the ticket sales of Hollywood films, but it was encouraging news to many people in the movie business who believe that the market for Taiwanese films is bouncing back after 20 years in the doldrums.
News of the June 29 death of Edward Yang, who won the Best Director Award in 2000 at the Cannes Film Festival for his work on A One and a Two, led many people to feel that the spirit of 1980s "New Cinema" was gone, and that Taiwan was in a "dead" era for film. On the other hand, however, the "Taiwan Den Young" festival organized by people in the film industry showed enthusiasm and a strong desire to reach out to audiences. But is there an audience in Taiwan? Is it really springtime again for Taiwanese films? Have filmmakers found the lifeline that comes from winning audiences over? It is worth taking another look.
On April 27 it was a breezy spring evening, and, as always, crowds of people were making their way into the Vieshow Cinemas on Taipei's Hsinyi Road. Posters for Hollywood films such as The Reaping and the third Pirates of the Caribbean, each two meters tall and a meter wide, hang all around the plaza outside the theater. Another poster for the Taiwanese film Island Etude, which shows a young man riding a bicycle against the backdrop of the sea and sky, takes up a small corner, too.
After only a week, the posters for Island Etude were much more visible. With enthusiastic audiences bumping up ticket sales, the screening space for Island Etude moved from a small theater seating less than 100 people to a theater with space for 200 moviegoers. At the Cinem@7 Theater in Hsimenting, the film's ticket sales topped all other films screened during the same period, while on the other side of the island at the historic Tatung Cinemas in Taitung, showings of the film looked like a Daoist temple fair, with one "village" of people after another bringing their whole family to see the movie.
It's true: a road movie about a bike trip around Taiwan sold 2 million tickets on its first day in theaters, one of the best showings in recent memory for a film made in Taiwan. It may seem like a small number when compared with the 10 million tickets sold for The Reaping, but the success of Island Etude has generated new interest in Taiwan film and sparked a fashion for around-the-island trips in Taiwan. Even King Liu, the 73-year-old chairman and founder of Giant Bicycles, recently made a 15-day bike tour around the island.
Hsimenting, a favorite spot in Taipei for young people, has witnessed the ups and downs of Taiwan cinema, from early Taiwanese-language movies to martial-arts films, adaptations of Chiung Yao novels, student movies, New Cinema, and the recent popularity of documentaries and dramas.
A new season for Taiwan film
Island Etude was one of at least eight new Taiwanese films released in the past few years. The new batch of Taiwan films began with Reflections, which was followed by Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. Spider Lilies, the story of a lesbian love affair, was released in late March. Finally, in late April Island Etude, the first film directed by the seasoned cinematographer En Chen, brought the beauty of Taiwan's coastline to audiences.
Island Etude was followed by the romance Exit No. 6, a film by Lin Yu-hsien, director of the documentary Jump! Boys Another film, The Touch of Fate, which was nominated for five Golden Horse awards last year, went head to head with Spiderman 3 in May. Amour-LEGENDE, directed by Wu Mi-sen and starring the well-known Japanese actor Yosuke Kubozuka, and the Taiwan historical film Song of Cha-Tian Mountain were both scheduled to begin screening in late June but may not show until later in the year because the locations for their premieres had not been set.
From lesbian relationships to youth culture, from the streets of Kuala Lumpur to the beaches of Taiwan, these eight films came together under the name of "Taiwan Den Young." Through events such as Kenting's Spring Scream and the Pitan Music Festival, these films hope to revive the spirit of Taiwan film in the 1980s and create a new spring for Taiwan film using the strength of a new community of film directors.
Why would they want to take on such a thankless job? Both Angelika Wang, a well-known producer and executive director of the Taiwan Den Young series, and En Chen, director of Island Etude, give the same answer: "We still believe that people who like Taiwanese films are out there. It's just a matter of getting them back."
Where is the audience?
If we take "new cinema" as a collective movement in film, however, then no one disputes that it had begun to weaken back in the mid-1990s when the energy in the scene quickly dissipated and ticket sales fell sharply. Against this background, claims that audiences have come back to Taiwanese films seem to raise even more questions, such as where is the audience? And how can we prove that they have really come back?
It seems as if new sparks are catching in the darkness. According to the Taiwan Cinema website, for ticket sales at Taipei City movie theaters, only around 20,000 viewers attended the three Taiwanese films with the highest ticket sales in 2003. For 2004, this number reached more than 100,000, and hit over 130,000 in 2006. Compared with the second Pirates of the Caribbean film, starring Johnny Depp, which, as the top foreign film in Taipei for 2006 sold 670,000 tickets, the numbers for Taiwan films may not be so impressive. Compared with the miserable statistics from 2001, however, the growth in audiences seen in recent years has been a shot in the arm to people in the Taiwan film industry.
It is clear that the bar has been raised for ticket sales for Taiwan films. In 2003, Chu Yu-ning's My Whispering Plan easily came in third overall in ticket sales of Taiwanese films at over 3 million. In 2007, however, Lin Yu-hsien's Exit No. 6 sold the same number of tickets, but landed only in tenth place.
But numbers like "130,000" or "1 million tickets sold" only serve to pose the question, have Taiwan films really taken off again? In fact, beyond the slow, steady growth in audience members, another factor is that the use of more marketable topics and content has helped to make it fashionable to watch locally made movies.
On the evening of May 29, there was a light breeze in the early summer air outside Room #201 in a building at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). "This year, the partner country for the Taipei Film Festival will be Denmark. The final film screening, representing Denmark, will be After the Wedding (Efter Bryllupet), which was nominated for this year's Oscar for best foreign-language film. Both The Farthest Distance, which will be the opening screening, and The Wall-Passer, which will show in November, are good choices." At the lectern is Yang Yuan-lin, a planner for the Taipei Film Festival, speaking on the subject of selecting films for a festival.
There is a strong energy and enthusiasm in this room of like-minded people. For the past three years, people in the film business have introduced new Taiwanese films to students through campus screenings or talks with directors, giving the students a chance to learn about the producers' and directors' artistic ideas and the process of filmmaking. Through this work and interaction with students, they have created a new force. When students and Taiwanese films are brought closer together, once the students learn more about the films they gain a sense of familiarity and identification with them, and as discussion of Taiwanese film heats up, watching Taiwanese films becomes a part of loving their local culture. On college campuses it has become de rigueur, and this has also helped to grow audiences for the films.
"When everyone is talking about Spider Lilies, Island Etude, or earlier movies like Let It Be or Doctor, if I haven't heard of them, then I feel totally lame," says a fresh-faced NTNU student. At the end of 1999, for example, Hong Hong, Hsiao Chu-chen, Wei Te-sheng and other young independent directors put together "Purely 16--A Film Carnival" as a way to overcome the difficulties of distributing Taiwanese films. The festival was very popular with young people, and tickets were hard to find. At the crowded discussion period at the festival, the students showed their joy at seeing their own world in these films.
Establishing "market orientation"
"When you make a movie, you don't have to make it dark all the time. It might look really arty this way, but when it's over, it's totally incomprehensible," said one student surnamed Chen, a third-year student in economics at Taipei University. Although moviemaking depends on enthusiasm and idealism, for audiences that just want relaxation and entertainment, over the last few years Taiwanese directors have solely been interested in "making art," but the unreachable heights of many art films have kept them from theater audiences.
After falling from great heights of popularity to embarrassingly low attendance numbers, how has Taiwan cinema managed to succeed in winning back audiences?
The Taiwan film industry saw production contract from over 100 films per year in 1985 to only a handful each year by the end of the twentieth century. Faced with this situation, in recent years Taiwanese directors have changed their attitude after seeing the realities of their environment. En Chen, director of Island Etude, believes that watching a movie is a kind of enjoyment and a spiritual interaction between the movie's creator and the audience.
"No more self-indulgent movies. We need to look at market trends and get closer to popular life," says director Pan Zhi-yuan. In contrast to "auteur theory" art films of Taiwan New Cinema that placed the director at the center of the film, The Touch of Fate was set against the serious problems with drugs and crime in contemporary Taiwan. The film's story of a high-school dropout falling to the crime-ridden bottom rungs of society offered a realist depiction of the terrible prices paid in the transition to adulthood.
Bringing together a niche market
"Audience habits research polls" are one way of catching up with audiences.
According to Yeh Yu-ping and Li Yao-hua, producers of Formula 17, founders of Three Dots Entertainment (now producers at SellMagic Picture), the production of Formula 17 was an exception to their experience in over 20 years in the Taiwan film industry. They did not want to depend on government grants, so instead they left that world behind altogether, and adopted methods of audience research polling and marketing analysis they learned working in companies that distribute foreign films. They discovered that if they could stay on top of the tastes and preferences of young audiences, they could find new audience groups for Taiwanese films that otherwise are directed toward small segments of the population. In their work, they have dispensed with widely held myths that Taiwanese film only had room for auteur-centered film-festival prizewinners
In 2004, they brought together farcical, slapstick humor with pop-star romance to make the surprise hit Formula 17 on a budget of only NT$3 million with a new director, Chen Yin-jung, and unknown performers. The film had the second highest ticket sales in Taipei for 2004 (over NT$6 million). It was a classic sleeper hit that broke new ground in the moribund Taiwan film market.
Lin Yu-hsien's documentary Jump! Boys was another successful example of a niche market hit. When first setting the film's marketing strategy, Lin saw clearly that the theme of Jump! Boys made it impossible to be as avant-garde or provocative as The Wayward Cloud. What he could do, however, was to invite former premier Frank Hsieh, who participated in gymnastics as a young man, to a screening as a way to get publicity for the film. Because the gymnastics team in the film was national champion three years in a row, Lin decided to try establishing a gymnastics foundation. He said that if ticket sales met expectations, he would donate 5% of the profits to the foundation. In this way, Lin associated his film with social concern and working for the public good.
Lin Yu-hsien also sent 560,000 coupons for NT$100 to schools at all levels in Taipei. Even if only 3% to 5% actually went to see the film, it could still produce the desired result: once word-of-mouth publicity began, they would also bring in families and college students for even more ticket sales.
Careful planning and alliances
At first, when film marketers saw the 2005 tearjerker Let It Be, they thought it was another Taiwanese movie "with no money, no people, no resources, and no theme." Thanks to careful marketing, however, the movie was an excellent performer with nearly 6 million tickets sold.
"A full-page newspaper report broke the impasse," recalls Chen Te-ling, executive director of Cimage Taiwan Film Co., who was in charge of marketing Let It Be. At first, the material in Let It Be about the old farmer Kun-pin was enough to serve as the "hot" part of the film--a story of gratitude from a salt-of-the-earth Taiwanese farmer. How to "light the spark," however, was still a problem.
First, they decided that the first stage for media exposure would be through newspapers and other print media. The size of newspaper pages is just too big, however, and reporters' email inboxes are already flooded with information, not to mention the fact that flashy, high-budget foreign films were always more attractive to audiences. These initial challenges put a damper on Cimage's team.
"When we had no other options, we thought we were going to be forced to 'buy space,' but this was the last thing we wanted to do, and we only had an advertising budget of NT$200,000, not even close to the NT$600,000 needed to buy a single page. In the end, it was the feeling that "people should see good movies" that allowed Let It Be to get a full-page interview for its director, Yan Lan-chuan, in the film section of the China Times. This important bit of free advertising helped generate momentum for the film, and radio and television stations such as News98, CtiTV, TVBS, and CTS also began asking for interviews. With well-chosen endorsements and a gentle style, Let It Be brought many people outside the mainstream of movie audiences into theaters.
In discussing the film business, Chuo Li, Ocean Deep Films producer for the fantasy love story The Wall-Passer (scheduled to release on November 9), focuses on practical issues. "Most Taiwanese films do not have adequate advertising and marketing budgets," he says. "So it is much more important to find ways to use others people's resources to your own advantage." Seeking added value through cross-industry alliances has become a common marketing method for Taiwanese films. Two movies that focus on youth subcultures, Exit No. 6 and Island Etude, were helped by alliances with Chunghwa Telecom, cell-phone maker Dopod, and Giant, the famous bicycle manufacturer. By using product placement marketing, they were able to garner extra publicity for both the films and the companies' brands.
Chuo Li of says that if the resources available to television stations could be brought to bear on the Taiwan film scene, there could be mutual benefits to the entire entertainment industry. He points to the example of France, where a number of films have relied on sponsorship from television stations to succeed in a difficult market. In Taiwan, Sanlih E-television provided funds to establish the Lumiere Motion Picture Corporation with the goal of using their experience from producing series like the hit show The Prince Who Turned into a Frog, to create higher-quality entertainment movies.
Whither Taiwan cinema?
As people begin to set high hopes for Taiwan cinema and even look for the arrival of a "New New Cinema," Hong Hong (Yen Hung-ya), who cowrote A Brighter Summer Day with Edward Yang and recently directed a new work, The Wall-Passer, says, "The 'flowering' that everyone sees is really only a small growth in ticket sales, but the creative ideas do not seem to have come back."
In terms of story content, compared with the wide variety of themes found in movies from South Korea such as the classic My Sassy Girl or the costume martial-arts film Shadowless Sword, Taiwanese films often limit themselves to themes of homosexuality or college life, or are packaged like popular TV shows. An old dog doesn't learn new tricks, and as these themes are recycled, audiences naturally lose interest. Moreover, the lack of old-time megastars like Brigitte Lin also accounts for low levels of interest in Taiwan films.
On another level, two longstanding problems in Taiwan's film industry--the lack of good scripts and of a complete system of producers--have yet to be resolved.
According to Yang Li-yin, winner of a Golden Bell award for best actress and producer of Island Etude, Taiwanese directors face a host of problems. "With no good stories, directors set out to write scripts on their own, shooting scenes, revising, making it up as they go," she says. "When they start shooting, they worry that they don't have enough money. When shooting is finished, they worry that they will not find a theater to show the film. When the copies are made, they worry that they won't get grant money."
Even as they enjoy a recovery in ticket sales, Taiwanese films remain at the bottom of Taiwan's film market. In 2002, one of the best years for Taiwanese film in the last decade, market share was 2.21%, making it the only year since 1996 when Taiwanese films had more than 2% market share. With 40 new films expected this year, will they be able to break this very low barrier of 2% again? Only time will tell.
The worst of times can be the best of times. Taiwanese films spent a long time out in the cold, long enough to make one forget that spring might come again. Pessimists say that little has changed, while optimists can only say, it's early spring, but with a chill in the air. The atmosphere is improving, but before the market structure for Taiwanese films has become stable and healthy enough to support substantial output and output value, staying alive is still the greatest challenge!
