The third annual Taipei Film Festival sponsored by the Taipei City government will open on November 17. Altogether 68 films will be shown at the festival, which is being held at the Warner Village film complex. After a major earthquake rocked Taiwan in September, the city decided that the light tone which had been originally planned was inappropriate, and chose the documentary And Life Goes On by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to open the festival.
"A successful film festival reveals its attitudes about film and concern for culture through its screening list," says Huang Chien-yeh, head of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. The festival selected And Life Goes On to send a message about Taiwanese society after the quake.
Kiarostami is famous for his 1987 film Where Is the Friend's House, which describes a boy from a small village who takes the wrong notebook home from school, and goes off to find his schoolmate without knowing where he lives. When a major earthquake hit Iran several years later, Kiarostami took a small crew to a village that had been destroyed by the quake, where they tried to find a group of children who would make audiences both laugh and cry. He filmed the documentary And Life Goes On to encourage the anguished Iranian people to get back up on their feet.
Riding the festivals
In addition to screening works that attest to the power of cinema, these year-end festivals also give the film community here a chance to take stock of its overall performance for the year. This year things are so depressed that a question looms like a dark cloud over the film community: Could it be that one day soon Taiwan film festivals will be unable to select any films made in Taiwan?
Peggy Chiao, a film critic who has served as a judge at many film festivals, worried about this as she was planning the Taipei Film Festival this year. "If you're just looking at Taiwan films, the outlook is very bleak," she says. This year she selected four Taiwan films, including Chang Tso-chi's Darkness and Light and Lin Cheng-sheng's March of Happiness, which have already been shown at Cannes or Venice. But she foresees that next year's production will be even smaller. The industry is showing little willingness to invest in new films, she explains, and there is continual bickering about grant money. Internationally acclaimed directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang have lost all hope of winning grants and have turned their focus toward selling the rights to their movies to foreign companies: "This is tantamount to selling our cultural resources to foreigners."
It's worth noting that although domestic film production is on the decline, there has been a profusion of small film festivals organized by the film industry, such as Spring International's Fanciful Film Festival, now in its seventh year. These festivals aim to attract specific audience segments by focusing on social or gender issues or the cinema of one nation.
With so many of these festivals, some domestic films have begun using them as a way to get shown at the "art house" theaters where they have their screenings. What have been the results?
Peggy Chiao explains that distributors go to festivals all over the world to buy films, which must be shown in cinemas first if their makers are going to get much for their video or cable rights. Makers of films that aim for a broad audience appeal hope that by packaging their films as having been shown at film festivals they can stir up interest in video and other downstream markets. On the other hand, feminist films, shorts, documentaries and other films with more specific orientations are entered at thematic festivals to maximize the interest of their audience segments, as well as to provide opportunities for like-minded people to meet and share ideas.
Getting a lock on an audience segment
When being shown at domestic film festivals, Taiwan films also can lower publicity costs and lock into audience segments. The "Purely 16" festival brought together independent filmmakers to break through the monopolization of cinema by 35 millimeter films. These 16 millimeter films included About July, which tells the tale of a youth struggling to repay his family's debts, and The Red Leaf Legend, a documentary about the first Taiwan team to win the Little League World Series, as well as four other films.
"It's become a way for newcomers who lack name recognition and the support of a big studio to make it," says critic Wen Tien-hsiang. Wen warns that if small festivals become the dumping grounds for "studios' leftovers," they will lose the sense of freshness they now hold for audiences. The potential of this happening combined with the inevitable winnowing that occurs through marketplace competition may mean that festivals won't turn out to be domestic films' Rock of Gibraltar after all.
"The emergence of these small festivals reflects a lack of confidence in the current distribution system among Taiwan directors and film production companies. Small film festivals are just one of the ways they are looking for a breakthrough," says Peggy Chiao, who cites the example of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flowers of Shanghai, which sold 200,000 tickets in Paris but only 20,000 in Taiwan. "It isn't a question of whether the film was worth watching, for it ought to have been more culturally accessible to the Chinese than to the French."
Chiao once asked the students in her class how many had seen Flowers of Shanghai, and not a single hand went up. The students all gave the same reason: "It was about olden times and looked dull. What's more, there weren't any television commercials for it."
When she followed up that question by asking if any had seen the film version of the 19th century English novel Sense and Sensibility, everyone rose their hands. To uncover the real standard that the class was using to choose between these films, Chiao asked: "Was Sense and Sensibility not about olden times as well? The two films were set during roughly the same period! Hollywood films with production budgets of US$50 million to US$60 million naturally have large advertising budgets too. Isn't a film's ability to afford advertising a rather biased standard for determining a film's value?" She advised her students to take the approach that a browser might take at a bookstore: If you are accustomed to look at recipe books for tips about what to cook on a diet, try for a change standing in front of another shelf to see what interests you there. You should force yourself to absorb other information in order to cultivate independent critical powers.
Seeing the world through movies
The domestic films shown in the old standby Golden Horse Festival, which kicks off in late November, and the Taipei Film Festival, which is only in its second year, allow the Taiwan film community both to reflect upon the general situation of film in Taiwan and to laud good domestic films. These festivals also aim to encourage cultural exchange and expand people's horizons.
This year's Taipei Film Festival has selected 68 films from 24 countries, which are grouped into six different thematic categories, including "New Beat, Japan," "New Beat, Scandinavia" and "Documentaries and Animation." One of these thematic categories, "A Tribute to Bai Guang," features six films of this recently deceased 1940s star, including A Strange Woman and When Roses Bloom. The festival planners hope that old and young moviegoers alike will experience a bit of old film culture.
"Overseas there is a lot of interest in watching old movies," says Chiao. "We hope to cultivate a little of this in Taiwan." In the idol-obsessed, fast-food culture of Taiwan, a year or two can constitute a new generation. Younger people have very short memories about Taiwan film culture.
Amid an information explosion, in an environment where commercial power is dominant, most domestic festivals aren't Hollywood oriented. By turning to festivals, the domestic film industry is pursuing a new distribution channel and thus attempting to save itself. Even more importantly, these festivals are testimony to Taiwan's inexhaustible creativity.
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One of the most highly acclaimed foreign films at the Taipei Filim Festival, Mike Takashi's The Bird People in China tells the story of two Japanese who travel on business to Yunnan Province, where they discover a tribe that believes people can fly. From time to time, the tribesmen even practice their own "flying techniques." Here in the remote mountains, where there is neither electricity nor running water, these travellers from the big city find a paradise of the soul.
