Taiwan in Motion, was a workshop held at the University of Edinburgh on 29 Novemebr 2013. Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, a network member, conducted an interview with Dr Chia Ling-Yang, organiser of the event. The interview can be accessed here, on audioboo. Below is a short report on the event, written by Dr Jens Damm of Chang Jung University. This report will also be published in the next issue of the Free University Berlin-based Berliner Chinahefte/Chinese History and Society No. 43.
Jens Damm
Taiwan in Motion, Workshop, University of Edinburgh, 29 November 2013
A workshop that was part of a larger event showing various films from Taiwan was organized by Chia-Ling Yang from the Department of Art History, University of Edinburgh. This workshop featured various directors who introduced their work and showed examples drawn from their films, which were mostly documentary movies. In this way, the workshop offered a platform for a discussion on the current state of Taiwanese cinema, cinematography and screen cultures.
The first session was opened by Ko-shang Shen ((沈可尚) “Self-Exploration through Film: My Creative Venture.” He showed parts of The Pigeon Game, a documentary commissioned by the National Geographic Channel, which was aired in more than 160 countries worldwide and won the Best Documentary Director of Golden Bell Award, Taiwan’s Emmy Award. His feature documentary, Baseball Boys, was released in 2009 and although it won the Grand Prize in the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, it clearly demonstrated that there is a general lack of audience interest in art movies, both in Taiwan and abroad.
Yin-chuan Tsai (蔡銀娟) “A Dream Journey－The Making of Stilt,” is a Taiwanese director and scriptwriter working in films and TV, as well as an acclaimed painter and book illustrator. She presented her own story, describing how she came to be a director. Her movies, which also won prestigious prizes, are highly appreciated by audiences.
During the break, a piano recital was performed by Yu-hsiang Huang (黃裕翔), a blind pianist who also played the lead in the semi-documentary film, Touch of the Light, by Jung-chi Chang (張榮吉). This director, in “Dream,” talked about the problems that he had encountered in directing this movie, and also about the difficulties that he had experienced with the producers. Jung-chi Chang won the Best Documentary Award at the Golden Horse Awards for My Football Summer and, in 2008, The End of the Tunnel, his graduation film won the Best Short Film Award at the Taipei Film Festival; he explained the importance of the events in everyday life which provide inspiration for his movies.
The directors were followed by Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley (SOAS, University of London), who presented a more theoretical paper on “Culture, Democratization and Taiwan Cinema” with a particular focus on cultural democratization processes in Taiwan after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. She argued that the contemporary Taiwanese film industry has been profoundly influenced and shaped by Taiwan New Cinema of the 1980s in terms of film education, film aesthetics and film economy. Finally, a round-table chaired by Julian Ward (University of Edinburgh) ended this fascinating workshop with a discussion on the differences in commercial productions and art productions in Taiwan. The three Chinese language markets were contrasted and a comparison was drawn between the specific productions emerging from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.