Taiwanese Cinema: Now and Then

Thu 05 Sep - Thu 03 Oct 2024
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Following our popular New Taiwanese Cinema season in Autumn 2023, we are delighted to launch a new strand, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan, to showcase the best of classic and contemporary filmmaking from the region. Join us throughout September for a celebration of two legendary director-actor collaborations, a martial arts classic, and some incredible recent debut feature films.
The iconic actor and filmmaker Lee Kang-sheng will be at the cinema in person for two Q&As exploring his career-long creative partnership with director Tsai Ming-liang. Lee will be discussing their most recent narrative feature Days (2020), as well as their 1997 masterpiece, The River. Additionally, King’s College London will welcome Lee for a free masterclass session examining his unique approach to filmmaking and performance on 10 September. Meanwhile, director Tsai himself will join us via Zoom for a post-screening Q&A for Where, the 2022 entry into his ongoing artist moving image series, ‘The Walker’.
Our spotlight also highlights the great Hou Hsiao-hsien, and his 21st Century collaborations with the luminous actress Shu Qi. The recent restoration of Millennium Mambo (2001) screens alongside the triptych love story Three Times (2005), as well as Hou’s last film, the beautiful wuxia, The Assassin (2015).
King Hu’s masterly A Touch of Zen (1970) represents the classic era of kung-fu cinema within the season. A sweeping epic of stunning mountains and forests, graceful fight choreography, and Buddhist inflections, A Touch of Zen‘s enduring legacy inspires martial arts filmmakers to this day. We approach the present with some of the best work created by Taiwanese directors in recent years. Huang Hsin-yao’s extremely funny satire The Great Buddha+ (2017) is now rightly considered a modern classic, and plays in a double bill with Huang’s ‘prelude’ short film, The Great Buddha (2014). Huang will also discuss the films in an online Q&A following the initial screening on 28 September. This exposé of the cynical exploitation of religion resonates strongly with Elvis Lu’s study of his own family’s reliance on divine guidance and rituals, in his documentary, A Holy Family (2022). Fiona Roan’s moving coming-of-age story American Girl (2021) depicts Taiwan through the eyes of a US teenager returning to her ancestral home, and is juxtaposed with another recent diasporic tale: the Sundance prize-winning Dìdi (2024). Sean Wang’s autobiographic debut recreates his experience as a second generation Asian-American, and received critical acclaim upon its recent release.