Witness to the Rise and Fall of Taiwan Film--The Golden Horses Turn 40

For their 40th anniversary, the Golden Horse Awards, an annual gathering of the Chinese-language film community, came to the ancient city of Tainan in southern Taiwan. It was a scene of celebration and excitement. The parade of stars included many of the biggest names in mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema, including acting superstars Andy Lau and Li Ming and directors Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang, and Stanley Kwan. With the beautiful people out in full force, star-chasing fans had a joyous weekend.

The Golden Horse Awards are the oldest Chinese-language film awards in Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, but over time they have begun to appear a bit weary and feckless.

Li Ya-mei, chairwoman of the Golden Horse's domestic film committee, explains that every time they finish putting on the awards they wonder where the money is going to come from next time around. And she describes constant fears about a steadily shrinking number of domestic films. In recent years, it truly has been a case of "suffering from domestic anxieties and foreign illnesses." In order to raise money to make up for national government funding cuts, the Golden Horse Awards have taken the show on the road, holding it in various places around the island in order to obtain local government funding. In order to meet these localities' expectations about stimulating tourism, the Golden Horse Awards have in effect turned into a "Golden Horse Travel Agency."

Looking back upon the Golden Horse's four decades, its run in Taiwan and the trend it has shown toward internationalization to some extent describes Taiwan's general ups and downs.

After 1990, Taiwan film started to make a name for itself and carve out a niche in the global film community. As a result, high-profile members of the global film community found invitations to the awards highly attractive. The awards have thus gradually overcome their provincialism to become very cosmopolitan in flavor. In the current period, Hong Kong films have been winning most of the Golden Horses, but over the last decade both Hong Kong and Taiwanese films have shown their own respective strengths. Take, for instance, the 28th Golden Horse Awards, when Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day and Ang Lee's Pushing Hands from Taiwan battled it out with Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild and Stanley Kwan's Center Stage from Hong Kong.

In the early 1990s, under the leadership of Li Hsing, a senior film director who served as chairman of the awards' executive committee, the Golden Horse Awards started to attract Chinese-language movies from all over to have test screenings. Then they invited filmmakers from mainland China to participate, actively promoting cinematic exchange across the strait.

Yet in the last few years, Taiwan's film industry has been suffering, and the dominance of Hong Kong film over Taiwan has become a reality at the awards. Without Hong Kong films, it is hard to imagine that anyone would concern themselves with the Golden Horses. To take the most recent awards, only eight dramas out of 51 competing films were from Taiwan, while 18 were from Hong Kong.

"The Golden Horse Awards shouldn't feel responsible for Taiwan film's loss of status," says film critic Wen Tien-hsiang. "In creating an award that is sought after by the entire Chinese-language film industry, there's no place for geographical limitations." Indeed, one shouldn't blame the decline of the Taiwanese film industry on a few directors who insisted on making artsy films. The decline was rather caused by a weakness and lack of diversity in the industry as a whole. When the Golden Horse Awards lead to a discussion about the condition of the Taiwanese film industry generally, one shouldn't get confused about the roots of the latter's problems.

There is in fact widespread understanding about the important role that the Golden Horse Awards Festival plays among all Chinese-language film festivals, and that it needn't assume the duty of pulling up the weak domestic film industry. As the oldest Chinese-language film awards, unlike the Golden Rooster Awards on the mainland or the Hong Kong Film Awards, the Golden Horse Awards bear the greatest claim to being the world's most representative Chinese film festival.

But even at a festival of cinematic arts, it's hard to keep politics out of it.

In September of 2003, the mainland authorities decreed that without official permission, joint productions between Taiwan and Hong Kong and mainland China could not participate in the Golden Horse Awards. In the past, there weren't many joint productions, and the effect wouldn't have been so dramatic, but as the mainland market has opened up over the last few years there has been a large increase in joint productions. As a result, this PRC proclamation immediately had a major impact on the films competing for a Golden Horse. For instance, whereas the Hong Kong films Infernal Affairs I and II did not receive any mainland funding, Infernal Affairs III is a joint production.

Interestingly, whereas joint productions involving the mainland have been scared off, the purely mainland production of Blind Shaft was entered in the competition, and won awards for best new actor and best screenplay adaptation. Because the director Li Yang has been blacklisted by the mainland authorities, the film can't be openly screened on the mainland-a circumstance that makes the awards just that much sweeter.

With the Taiwan film industry struggling for lack of money, films and stars, the Golden Horse has taken upon itself the role of promoting films and providing a chance for industry networking. Li holds that the awards have made a contribution to developing Chinese-language film, and that enthusiastic participation is a good thing. He argues that it would be best for everyone to come to the aid of this great event to help it continue year after year.

That old soldier the Golden Horse Awards has recorded the rise and fall of the Taiwanese film industry. But what's in store for the future? Can Taiwanese film, like professional baseball on the island, rise phoenix-like from the ashes? We'll just have to wait and see.