Face (臉), the latest work by director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), which premiered on Tuesday night, is the first Taiwanese movie funded by the EU and a prime example of cultural cooperation between the EU and Taiwan, Europe’s top envoy to Taiwan said recently.
The film is not only the first Chinese-language movie to receive funding from the European Commission’s MEDIA program, but is also the biggest EU-Taiwan cooperative film venture ever, Guy Ledoux said in an interview.
“The fact that cultural cooperation between Taiwan and the EU at such a level is possible is because Taiwan has a very dynamic and advanced cultural industry,” Ledoux said.
“Taiwan has a comparative advantage in the field of culture and the freedom of expression that exists in Taiwan has enabled Taiwan’s cultural industry to flourish and become very attractive,” he said.
Describing Face as “a very beautiful project” because it intertwines scenes in Europe and Taiwan and features iconic actors from both places, Ledoux said he hoped there will be more culturally oriented cooperation projects between the EU and Taiwan.
Face is a narrative feature film commissioned by the Louvre in Paris and directed by Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based Tsai. The production, which features noted French stars Laetitia Casta, Fanny Ardant and Jean-Pierre Leaud, as well as Taiwanese actors Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) and Lu Yi-ching (陸奕靜), will be the first movie that the Louvre will add to its collection of some of the world’s finest art.
Known as Visage in French, it is described as a film within a film, telling the story of a Chinese filmmaker who heads to the Louvre to shoot a film revolving around the myth of Salome and her request to her father Herod that St John the Baptist be beheaded.
The film cost NT$178.6 million (US$5.5 million) to make and in addition to funds from Taiwan, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the EU’s MEDIA program contributed 50,000 euros (US$73,000) to help with production.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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