Burmese-Chinese director Midi Z’s (趙德胤) film Ice Poison (冰毒), which won a best film award at the 68th Edinburgh International Film Festival last week, is scheduled to open in Taiwan on July 18.
A premiere will be held on July 9 during the Taipei Film Festival, distributor Flash Forward Entertainment said yesterday.
Ice Poison was the first Taiwanese-produced movie to win the Scottish festival’s Best International Feature Film award.
The film, shot in Myanmar, charts the economic despair in the rural and developing parts of that country.
It is set is Lashio, a market town with a large ethnic Chinese population in Shan State, and centers on a poor farmer who is lured into selling crystal meth, which is called “ice poison” in Chinese.
On Monday, the Ministry of Culture gave a NT$100,000 cash prize to Midi Z and his film crew, who are all Taiwanese, for winning the award.
The 32-year-old director, who moved from Myanmar to Taiwan at the age of 16, said he could not imagine what he would be doing now had he not come to Taiwan.
He said the nation’s free and open society has helped his filmmaking, and renowned Taiwanese directors such as Ang Lee (李安) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) have influenced his work.
Midi Z studied film direction at a Taiwanese university and produced his first short film Paloma Blanca as part of his work for his degree in 2006. The film was screened at numerous film festivals around the world.
In 2009, he was selected to become a member of the first Taipei Golden Horse Film Academy, which allows young filmmakers to interact with each other and learn from accomplished directors.
A short film that he released that year, Hua-Xing Incident, was produced by Hou.
Since then, Midi Z has made three feature films, including Return to Burma, released in 2011, and Poor Folk, released in 2012, as well as the shorts Motorcycle Drive (2008) and last year’s The Palace on the Sea.
Return to Burma was selected to compete in the New Currents section at the 2011 Busan International Film Festival.
Additional reporting by staff reporter
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