Despite a decrease of 12 per cent in box-office revenue when compared to the previous year, Taiwanese cinema in 2019 showed no decline in quality. Films continued to tell engaging stories and were supported by steadily improving technical accomplishments.
Works like A Sun, Detention and We Are Champions brought new perspectives in family drama, thriller/horror, and sport respectively, and they can be considered the most representative films of the year. Moreover, all three were produced by women, demonstrating their importance in Taiwanese cinema.
Audiences were scarce during Lunar New Year. Out of the three films aiming to become blockbusters, namely Han Dan, Big Three Dragons, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Show, only Han Dan had a passable box office result.
Inspired by the local tradition of “Bombing Master Han Dan”, a folk festival involving a barrage of firecrackers, Han Dan is certainly an inspired and original work, although it’s flat in terms of character design. Its box-office take of NT$50 million can’t compete with the much higher figures of previous Lunar New Year successes.
By contrast, the comedy Big Three Dragons featured an exceptional cast. But its fragmented plot, which is based on the mahjong games typically played during the festive period, didn’t appeal to the public.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Show was adapted from the hit musical Crazy TV and is a rare attempt to innovate in a market dominated by local comedies. Unfortunately, the nostalgia for the TV shows of the 1990s didn’t pique the interest of the younger generations.
But The Gangs, the Oscars, and the Walking Dead, released in the autumn, did manage to forge a new direction for comedy. The Gangs…, a mix of zombies and black humour, tells the story of a criminal gang interfering in the production of a film.
Director Kao Pin-chuan, despite a limited budget, lays bare the passion and frustration of film crews thanks to the performances of a large cast featuring Roy Chiu, Huang Di-yang, Lung Shao-hua and Yao Yi-ti. The film’s transgender themes shape an absurd comedy with a typical Formosan flavour.
Fall in Love at First Kiss, released for Valentine’s Day, is the latest work by director Frankie Chen, coming four years after his hugely successful Our Times. The work is inspired by the well-known Japanese manga Itazura na Kiss, which has already been adapted into the Taiwanese idol dramas It Started with a Kiss and They Kiss Again.
The film opened in the shade of the original. The public’s preconceived ideas about the characters and plot diminished its success in Taiwan, although it met a better reception in mainland China.
Since the trendsetting You Are the Apple of My Eye in 2011, “school campus films” have become Taiwanese cinema’s strong point. 2019 was no exception, thanks to Fall in Love at First Kiss and Stand by Me. The latter, directed by Lai Meng-jie and adapted from the novella Pace Runner by writer Song Xiaojun, features Mason Lee, Shao Yu-wei and Tsai Jui-hsueh.
There were the usual elements of comedy and sentimentality, but a love triangle linked to “the guardian angel” who assists marathon runners during the race provided originality. It was nominated for best adapted screenplay at the Golden Horse Awards.
Still on the subject of young love, We Are Champions is a motivational film based on the Taiwanese HBL basketball championships. This is a superior production in terms of the scale of its locations and its technical aspects. Cleverly combining emotion and pacing, the film brings more kudos to Taiwanese youth sports films.
We Are Champions is the result of a new collaboration between filmmaker Chang Jung-chi and producer Rachel Chen, following their Touch of the Light in 2012. Chang previously shot sports documentaries and became interested in the adrenaline-filled stories of the basketball league, which are brimming with teenage energy.
At the end of 2012, after his We Are Champions project was selected by the Golden Horse Film Project Promotion platform, Chang Jung-chi carried out further investigations in the field, continuing to discuss and edit the screenplay with screenwriter Tsai Kun-lin. Eventually he decided to focus on family friction and the spirit of competition between two brothers attending the same basketball school.
In order to realistically represent the young students’ tough training regimes, We Are Champions needed actors who looked like high school students and possessed some basketball skills. Fandy Fan and Berant Zhu, were selected among from 2,000 hopefuls at the auditions. Fandy Fan was even awarded the Golden Horse Award for Best New Performer thanks to his fresh and natural performance.
Tactics on the field were carefully planned by professional coaches, and the movements of the actors were coordinated by the director of photography. These elements add up to a sports film full of precision, realism and dramatic tension.
Detention is another work with a high school setting, but it’s in a completely different genre. The film, adapted from the best-selling video game of the same name, takes viewers directly into a horror and fantasy world in the 1960s. The story revisits Taiwan’s political crackdown, the White Terror. The movie inspired heated discussions among viewers, and took a huge NT$260 million, crowning it the box office champion of 2019.
Detention started as an adventure horror game which was popular in early 2017. The video game tells the story of two schoolmates trying to escape from a school building, and gradually reveals the truth behind their entrapment. Producers Lee Lieh and Aileen Li made good use of the video game’s popularity and narrative power, inviting director John Hsu to join them in two-and-a-half years of preparation for the first Taiwanese feature adapted from a video game.
The video game Detention was a narrative-focused production, full of symbols and places with a strong cinematic flavour. So the various roles, plots and locations were already well-known before being transposed to the big screen.
The feature film, while maintaining these basic elements, softened the folkloristic and religious aspects of the original to focus on the relationship between the protagonists, played by Gingle Wang, Tseng Chin-hua and Fu Meng-po, and the story evolves into a spiral of terror. The abundant visual effects and sound effects immerse viewers in the suffocating atmosphere of the time, and increase the feeling of estrangement.
The director was newcomer John Hsu, a long-time videogamer who had the right credentials to take Detention’s unique features and make them into a successful film. The movie won five Golden Horse Awards: Best New Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Visual Effects and Best Original Film Song.
For the first time since 1996, when the Golden Horse Awards allowed Chinese language-films produced outside Taiwan to take part in the event, works from mainland China were absent. This included many Hong Kong co-productions with the mainland.
The award for Best Feature Film went to A Sun, directed by Chung Mong-hong, a work that adds elements of tenderness to the cold, brutal sarcasm typical of this filmmaker. His analysis of the problems and complex relationships which exist inside the family unit is a great contribution to films dealing with such topics.
A Sun is about a family of four who have conflicting relationships and undisclosed secrets. The father is a driving school instructor, the mother is a hairdresser, the eldest son is a high school student striving to be accepted into university, and the other son is a troubled youth who ends up in juvenile detention. In charge of screenwriting, directing and photography, Chung Mong-hong masterfully controls the narrative and visual style of the entire film.
Among Chung’s creations, A Sun is the one with the largest number of protagonists. All have equally important roles and their interactions form the basis of the story. The director worked carefully on selecting the actors, starting to evaluate the options even while working on his previous production, Xiao Mei. Protagonists include Chen Yi-wen, Ko Shu-chin, Wu Chien-ho and Liu Kuan-ting who gave great performances in Xiao Mei.
The success of the film was due to this careful choice of actors, and the film’s nominations at the Golden Horse Awards covered all four categories of acting. Chen Yi-wen, as a miserable and short-tempered father, and Liu Kuan-ting, in the role of a petty criminal, were awarded Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for their vivid interpretation of complicated human psychologies.
Female producers worked behind the scenes of A Sun, Detention and We Are Champions. Producers Yeh Jufeng, Tseng Shao-chien, Lee Lieh, Aileen Li and Rachel Chen are some of the most outstanding women in Taiwanese cinema.
We Are Champions producer Rachel Chen started her career in the media, and then moved into cinema. She worked as general manager of Jet Tone Films Taiwan, and in 2011 founded Touch of Light Films. She produced Touch of the Light the following year, and it received public and critical acclaim. The company’s second production, My Egg Boy, directed by Fu Tien-yu with Ariel Lin and Rhydian Vaughan, appeared in 2016.
After seven years of preparation We Are Champions was completed, with a budget of NT$80 million. The location of the matches progresses from streets to school gyms, then small arenas, and finally the huge Taipei Arena. Despite the increasing scale of the scenes, the quality of shooting and post-production remains high, demonstrating the skills of the production team.
Yeh Jufeng is the producer behind A Sun. Yeh has almost 30 years of experience and has worked with international artists such as Tsai Ming-liang and John Woo. She currently heads Mandarin Vision’s production department and is an expert in television and film product development, budget management and general supervision. In 2013, she also received the prestigious Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year award at the Golden Horse ceremony.
After some memorable productions such as Girlfriend Boyfriend, Zone Pro Site and Our Times, she has been collaborating with director Chung Mong-hong since 2013. Chung shot Soul, Godspeed and A Sun. Tseng Shao-chien, the co-producer, an art history teacher, is Chung’s wife, and has participated in every one of her husband’s films since his debut Parking. We can consider her one of the driving forces behind the films.
Lee Lieh and Aileen Li, producers of Detention, also have extensive film experience. The former started out as an actress, then founded 1 Production in 2007, releasing Orz Boys, a debut feature well received by critics and audiences alike. Monga, Jump Ashin! and Zone Pro Site managed to keep the quality level high.
Aileen Li, on the other hand, gained notoriety in 2003 for producing Formula 17, a romantic comedy with a gay theme. Particularly adept at creating international collaborations, Aileen has delivered a wide variety of films including the fantasy comedy When a Wolf Falls in Love with a Sheep, the action movie Black and White: The Dawn of Assault, and the epic disaster movie The Crossing.
When Detention began shooting in 2017, despite the crisis that Taiwanese cinema was then facing, Lee Lieh and Aileen Li did not cut the budget. Instead they sought out funding and achieved a total of almost NT$100 million. It was their broad-mindedness and confidence in a 100% Taiwanese production that released the potential of the 2019 hit.
At the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus epidemic had a negative impact on cinema attendance, which compared to expectations, showed a decrease of 30% and 40% respectively during the Lunar New Year and the local 28 February holiday.
But the horror film The Bridge Curse, another production set in a school, captured the public’s attention, taking NT$23 million in its first week. The positive outcome confirmed the great commercial potential of this genre.
Hsiang Yi-fei