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‘We worked together on the project and what mattered most wasn’t whether we made something successful. It was the team spirit and the strength we put together then. Something we don’t see today.’

– Sylvia Chang

Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema is a season curated by Hyun Jin Cho and presented in partnership with Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and Ministry of Culture, Taiwan. Taiwan New Cinema was grounded in a collective spirit of creativity, playfulness, and humility. Yet, while auteurs like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are internationally recognised, many pivotal figures remain lesser known.

Taipei Story

This innovative season hopes to paint a fuller picture of this vibrant movement and shift the spotlight towards lesser known but vital contributors, whose work helped shape this new cinematic expression, with around half of the features never having screened in UK cinemas before. Several films, such as My Favorite...

1984 signaled the beginning of the “Coming of Age” trilogy that began with “A Summer in Grandpa's”. The film is based on Chu Tien Wen's childhood memories, one of the most renowned theatrical writers and novelists of the country. The protagonists are two kids, a fact that established Hou's ability to direct kid actors. The movie won a Best Director award at the 1984 Asia-Pacific Film Festival, the Golden Montgolfiere award (tied with The Runner (1984)) at the 1985 Nantes Three Continents Festival, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury – Special Mention at the 1985 Locarno International Film Festival. It was also the first work of the Taiwanese auteur to screen in the US, in 1986. Also of note is the fact that Hou cast Edward Yang in a brief role, with Yang returning the favor by casting Hou in his film “Taipei Story”

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Two city kids,...

The title of Girish Kasaravalli's 1977 film "Ghatashraddha" is directly translated as "The Ritual," although the on-screen English title is "Ritual of Excommunication." Both titles reflect the bleak circumstances of the film's protagonist, even though "The Ritual" implies that women are abused and discarded as a matter of course. "Ghatashraddha" is a bleak tragedy about a woman named Yamuna (Meena Kuttappa) who lives with her religious schoolteacher father (Ramaswamy Iyengar) and who is already a widow at a young age. Yamuna is already seeing another man, also a schoolteacher, although their affair is secret ... as is her pregnancy. The only person who treats Yamuna with any friendliness is a young boy named Naani (Ajith Kumar), who serves as a witness to the story.

When her father goes out of town to raise money for his school, everything falls apart. The school deteriorates, gossip begins to spread, and Yamuna becomes an outcast.

Film at Lincoln Center is unveiling an Edward Yang retrospective to honor the late filmmaker into the New Year.

Titled “Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang,” the curated series includes screenings of Yang’s “Yi Yi,” “A Brighter Summer Day,” “Taipei Story,” and the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of “Mahjong.” The Film at Lincoln Center series additionally debuts a new restoration of “A Confucian Confusion.”

IndieWire now reveals that the series, which kicks off December 22, will extend its run through January 9 with new additional screenings, including “Mahjong” in 4K. Also, Yang’s widow, pianist Kaili Peng, who composed the score for “Yi Yi” and is heard playing the piano throughout the film, will introduce the 6:30 p.m. screening of that film on December 22 at 6:30 p.m. That screening will follow a special opening reception at the Furman Gallery at 5:00 p.m.

“Desire/Expectations...

A holy grail of restorations is premiering soon. As part of Film at Lincoln Center’s Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang the 4K restoration of the late, legendary director’s 1996 feature Mahjong will world-premiere.

Along with all of his features, the series also includes the anthology film In Our Time, which he contributed to, as well as The Winter of 1905, directed by Yu Wei-cheng and scripted by Yang, and nine minutes from Yang’s unfinished animated martial arts film The Wind (2002–2005), whose production was halted after his death.

Also featuring the recently restored A Confucian Confusion, a proper run of Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day, Taipei Story, That Day, on the Beach, and Terrorizers, see the lineup and schedule below, with tickets on sale Thursday, November 30 at noon and an Flc Members pre-sale starting Wednesday, November 29 at noon.

The Winter of 1905

Yu Wei-cheng, 1982, Taiwan, 90m

Mandarin with...

He may be the world’s greatest living filmmaker, and now we know we’ve seen his last film.

Hou Hsiao-hsien, director of timeless masterpieces such as “A City of Sadness,” “The Puppetmaster,” “Flowers of Shanghai,” and “Millennium Mambo” is battling dementia and is now retired from filmmaking. The 76-year-old Taiwanese auteur had been hoping to make his long-in-development film “Shulan River” up until the past couple years, and location scouting had begun. Now, 2015’s “The Assassin” will stand as his final film.

The news broke that Hou is now retired via film scholar Tony Rayns’ introduction to a screening of his 1985 film “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” at the Garden Cinema in London on October 23. IndieWire has since confirmed the news with a source close to Hou as well as with the film curator of the Garden Cinema, George Crosthwait, who said that the director “will certainly not work again.

Edward Yang’s retrospective is the highlight of this year’s Five Flavours. For decades, he was known as a key representative of the Taiwanese New Wave and a master of world cinema but – strangely enough – he is still waiting to be fully discovered. The program was long in the making, as Yang’s films were being digitally restored. Now, for the first time in Poland, the festival can present his retrospective to the public.

Edward Yang shows the world of the upper-middle class in Taipei – the city he portraits as conflicted, chaotic, filled with chance encounters and surprising coincidences. New skyscrapers contrast with makeshift houses, extreme materialism coexists with a deep longing for the sense of belonging, American restaurants and clubs go hand in hand with traditional stalls offering cheap, local snacks. In every one of his films, Yang focuses on the images of modern love and the hope...

No artist captures the aimless pain of alienation quite like Tsai Ming-liang. His first feature, 1992’s “Rebels of the Neon God,” can almost be described as “The 400 Blows,” by way of “Taipei Story,” (only stranger) Tsai being quite possibly the third most influential director of Taiwan’s second New Wave movement, alongside Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Continue reading Taiwanese New Wave Master Tsai Ming-Liang Discusses His Film ‘Days’ & Ideas On “Art Museum Cinema” [Interview] at The Playlist.

Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”) returned for a second evening at the Tokyo International Film festival’s Asia Lounge talk series, which features dialogues between leading Asian film directors and their Japanese peers.

On a video link from Taiwan, Kore-eda’s onscreen guest was award-winning filmmaker Huang Xi. Her debut feature, “Missing Johnny” won the Taipei Film Festival best screenplay award in 2017.

The two shared far-reaching connections with Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien,” with whom Huang had worked on such films as “Goodbye South Goodbye,” and “The Assassin.”

Kore-eda praised “Missing Johnny” for scenes including one with actress Rima Zeidan and a parrot, which the camera catches in the street, among greenery, and from a distance, rather than in close-up. “The area was good for portraying just how small human beings can be against the height of the trees,” said Huang.

“I had many long takes because I became interested in certain scenes,...

The FarewellWhen released over 25 years ago in 1993, Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club was considered a triumph, the first film to realize the dream of Asian and Asian-American representation in Hollywood. Rather than predict a change in course, however, it remained an anomaly. Virtually no American films comparably invested in the sorts of cross-cultural divides chronicled in Wang’s saga of mother-daughter rifts and continuities saw the light of day, until last year’s romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, and more significantly, Lulu Wang’s Sundance breakout, The Farewell. Not that world cinema lacked insights on the growing pains of the immigrant experience, and the East-West, tradition versus modernity conflicts that comprise the thematic meat of similarly charted family dramas. The United States saw a “70 percent increase in the population [of Asians] from 1980 to 1988,” according to a New York Times report, and Chinese immigrants made up a significant portion. The success...

After four years Martin Scorsese is back with another six filmic gems from all corners of the Earth. Love struggles in the slums of Thailand and the economic boom town of Taipei; underdog heroes undertake troubled missions in Turkey and Kazakhstan, a Malay storyteller plays cinematic games with basic narrative, and a vintage Brazilian art film is pure visual poetry. They’ve all been rescued by the World Cinema Project.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2

Blu-ray + DVD

The Criterion Collection 873-879

1931 – 2000 / Color + B&W / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 30, 2017 / 124.95

Directed by Lino Brocka, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ermek Shinarbaev, Mário Peixoto, Lütfi Ö. Akad, Edward Yang

I readily confess that in my patchy history of film festival attendance, I gravitated not toward the really obscure foreign films, unless they promise to be as entertaining as things I’m more familiar with. Based on the results, one of...