Taiwanese director Fu Tien-yu (傅天余) was presented a Kurosawa Akira Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) on Tuesday for her feature film Day Off (本日公休), event organizers said in a news release.
Fu’s film follows the protagonist, a female barber, embarking on a long journey to cut the hair of an old customer who moved away and is too sick to travel, the Ministry of Culture’s Taiwan Creative Content Agency said.
At the awards ceremony, TIFF programming director Ichiyama Shozo, who is also a selection committee member, said that Fu showed the same spirit in Taiwanese New Cinema wave and “depicted life in Taiwan realistically and sympathetically.”
Photo: CNA
Veteran Japanese director Yamada Yoji said that Fu’s film was “a really lovely film, which depicts people with precision and warmth,” and praised Fu’s “state-of-the-art” cinematic expression.
Yamada added that the movie made him wonder “why can’t the Japanese make this kind of work?”
After expressing gratitude for her recognition from the festival and the committee members, Fu called Yamada her “idol” and said she gets “great power from his work.”
Asked by a Taiwanese journalist how she felt about the future of young filmmakers in Taiwan, Fu said that her generation is different from Akira Kurosawa’s, but that she feels that “film is precious.”
The experience of going to a dark theater and sharing a film with others is irreplaceable, she said.
“I will put all my heart and soul into making films in the future,” she added.
The Kurosawa Akira Award “was born because many younger filmmakers don’t know the work of Akira Kurosawa, and we wanted to help pass down his name and spirit,” TIFF chairman Ando Hiroyasu said.
Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese director often cited as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
After being established in 2004, the award was discontinued for 14 years before being resumed in 2022.
Fu was the second Taiwanese director to receive the award, after Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢).
This year, recipients of the award each received a crystal trophy and a ¥1 million (US$6,485) cash prize.
In addition to Ichiyama Shozo and Yamada Yoji, this year’s selection committee consisted of casting director Narahashi Yoko and film critic Kawamoto Saburo.
The TIFF, now in its 37th year, last year declared its mission was “to amplify the possibilities of cinema from Tokyo and contribute to interactions with a diverse world.”
This year, the festival proposed the principles of “international exchange,” “nurturing talent for the industry’s future” and “the female perspective,” it said on its official Web site.
Meanwhile, Taiwan-based Malaysian film director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) was honored with an award on Sunday from the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Prague said.
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry