New Taiwanese Cinema Film Festival
April 21 - 22
Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library
For information call: 919-962-4099
Download flier in English or Chinese
Director Wang Tong, whose films helped transform modern Taiwanese cinema, will speak about his work during UNC-Chapel Hill's New Taiwanese Cinema Film Festival April 21 - 22.
The festival, a collaboration between the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Carolina Asia Center, is free and open to the public. All events will take place in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Library. For more information, contact, Winifred Fordham Metz at (919) 962-4099.
On Friday, April 21, Wang will introduce his film Straw Man (1987). A reception begins at 5:00 p.m.; remarks and screening begin at 7:00 p.m. Straw Man was named Best Picture at the Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan's most prestigious award for Chinese-language cinema.
On Saturday, April 22, a screening of Wang's Banana Paradise (1989) begins at 1:00 p.m., followed by a panel discussion with Wang; Dr. Robin Visser and Dr. Li-ling Hsiao, both assistant professors of Asian Studies at UNC; Dr. Guo-Juin Hong, assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture at Duke University; and Dr. Leo Ching, associate professor and chair of Asian and African languages and literature at Duke University.
The New Taiwanese Cinema Film Festival celebrates a gift of 120 Taiwanese films that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) presented last July to UNC's University Library.
UNC's library has the largest Chinese-language collection in the South said Hsi-Chu Bolick, East Asian bibliographer for the library. The TECO collection, which contains films ranging from commercial successes to government productions, represents a valuable addition.
Bolick notes that the film collection builds upon a previous TECO gift of 1,500 books about Taiwan, donated to the library in 2002. "TECO appreciated our commitment to acquiring materials from Taiwan and saw that we were really interested in serving scholars not just from UNC, but the entire region." A grant from the Carolina Asia Center enabled the library to bring the films to UNC and to process the collection.
UNC's Hsiao believes the donation will give American students a rare chance to encounter films from Taiwan and to learn more about a culture that is less familiar than the images portrayed in the well-known films of mainland China and Hong Kong.
"Over the last fifty years," she said, "Taiwan has developed a unique culture of its own that these films document and investigate. This gift gives a deeper understanding of Taiwan both as a Chinese culture and as a distinct culture in its own right."
Bolick knows of faculty members at UNC and Duke who are already planning to incorporate films from the collection into their courses and research.
"One real benefit of this collection is that TECO arranged to have many of the films subtitled, even though that's not the way they were originally distributed. If you think about Director Wang-he's such a key figure, but so few students have the language skills to study his work that faculty haven't been able to teach his films."
Wang Tong is considered part of the "New Taiwanese Cinema" movement of the 1980s and 1990s, when filmmakers changed focus from cinematic retellings of traditional literature and instead began portraying contemporary class relationships, social structures, and economics. However, TECO's web site notes that Wang's style is "distinctive and very different from most of the Taiwan New Cinema directors. Ranging from historical drama to political satire to romantic comedy to social commentary to martial arts action, Wang's works vary widely in terms of subjects and genres."
Straw Man and Banana Paradise are the first two parts of a trilogy that also includes "Hill of No Return" (1992). The films portray Taiwanese life beginning with the final years of World War II and the waning Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and continuing through the late 1980s.
Following the film festival, Straw Man and Banana Paradise will become part of the Media Resources Collection in the House Undergraduate Library on the UNC campus, where students, faculty, and members of the public will be able to watch them. The rest of the TECO collection will be made available as the library restores each film for use.
