On a screen in a darkened theater, a man and woman attend a banquet. The man is badgering the woman, insisting they met last year. The woman is equally insistent in denying it.

The film’s plot was straightforward, but its setting was ambiguous and its narrative unclear. There were large variations in the lighting, intense contrasts between black and white, disconnected sentences, sudden bits of dialogue and background conversation. I zoned out, barely able to keep my eyes open.

I saw Alain Resnais’ 1961 film L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) for the first time at a Golden Horse Film Festival in the 1980s. Experimental movies of that sort—intermingling reality, fantasy, and memory—were rarely screened in Taiwan back then, and Res­nais’ film turned my understanding of traditional moviemaking on its head.

I was a film lover, but didn’t really understand what the movie was saying. Even so, the wide shot of the characters in that great empty garden, mumbling at one another in elegant-sounding French, stuck with me. Over time, I gradually came to appreciate these kinds of odd, enigmatic films, to understand why they were so highly regarded and to grasp the importance of those who worked behind the scenes—directors, cinematographers, designers—to the final product.

The Golden Horse festivals have provided Taiwanese film buffs with a window into the world of international film, while the Golden Horse awards have spurred the creativity of the Chinese-language film industry.

Those Days, These Moments, a book commemorating the Golden Horses’ 50th anniversary, records the thoughts of award winners on the significance of their awards.

The book notes that when Hong Kong director Peter Chan won the 2006 best director prize for his film Perhaps Love, he was unable to attend because he was preparing to shoot The Warlords in freezing Beijing weather. Chan was struggling because his investors had taken issue with the new movie’s script just before filming was set to begin. With hundreds of workers on set waiting for his go-ahead to start, Chan was under enormous pressure and nearly had a breakdown. When his award was announced and a reporter called to congratulate him, he burst into tears on the phone.

“Everyone thinks these awards are just gilding the lily, but they’re not like that,” said Chan. “My Golden Horse was a lifesaver.” Chan went on to win his second best director prize two years later, for The Warlords.

When Taiwanese actor and director Leon Dai addressed the systemic bias against single fathers in the true story No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti in 2009, he earned Golden Horses for both best director and best original screenplay. Gratified by the awards’ recognition of his socially aware film, Dai has become even more committed to his efforts to bring about social change.

The film industry is a creative–cultural locomotive, a dream factory distilling the essence of the human experience into its products. The Golden Horses—past, present, and future—are a barometer for the growth of Taiwanese society, and a record of the evolution of and interactions among the Chinese-speaking regions of the world.

For their 50th anniversary, the Golden Horses invited renowned director Ang Lee to chair the awards jury. A recipient of virtually all the world’s major film prizes, Lee has enormous confidence in the future of Chinese-language film. Observing that there are four times as many Chinese speakers in the world as English speakers, and that Chinese-language films have been making rapid progress, Lee argues that the Chinese-language film industry will be bigger than Hollywood within a decade.

With the Chinese-language film market on the rise, the Taiwanese film industry’s mission is clear: continue striving to innovate, cultivate domestic talent, and explore diverse themes.

With that in mind, this year’s 50th Golden Horses are sure to ring out the past in style and ring in an exciting new future.