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Taiwanese Film Festival at UNC 
to include films, director’s talk

CHAPEL HILL — Director Wang Tong, whose films helped transform modern Taiwanese cinema, will speak about his work during the upcoming "New Taiwanese Film Festival" at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The festival, a collaboration between the University Library and the Carolina Asia Center, will be free and open to the public April 21-22. Events will be in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Library. For more information, call Winifred Fordham Metz at (919) 962-4099.

On April 21, Wang will introduce his film "Straw Man" (1987). A reception will begin at 5 p.m.; his remarks, at 7 p.m., followed by the screening. "Straw Man" was named Best Picture at the Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s top award for Chinese-language cinema.

On April 22, a screening of Wang’s "Banana Paradise" (1989) at 1 p.m. will be followed by a panel discussion with Wang; Dr. Robin Visser and Dr. Li-ling Hsiao, UNC assistant professors of Asian studies; Dr. Guo-Juin Hong, assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture at Duke University; and Dr. Leo Ching, associate professor and chair of Asian and African languages and literature at Duke.

The festival will celebrate a gift of 120 Taiwanese films that the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, located in Atlanta, presented last July to the UNC Library. A grant from the Carolina Asia Center enabled the library to bring the films to UNC and begin restoring them.

The new gift builds on a donation in 2002, from the same office, of 1,500 books about Taiwan. Both gifts count toward the Carolina First Campaign, a comprehensive, multi-year private fund-raising campaign, with a goal of $2 billion, to support Carolina’s vision of becoming the nation’s leading public university.

The library has the largest Chinese-language collection in the South, said East Asian bibliographer Hsi-Chu Bolick. The new films, with topics ranging from commercial successes to government productions, are a valuable addition, she said.

"TECO appreciated our commitment to acquiring materials from Taiwan and saw that we were really interested in serving scholars, not just from UNC, but from the entire region," Bolick said.

UNC’s Hsiao believes the collection will give American students a rare chance to see Taiwanese films and learn more about a culture that is less familiar than those portrayed in well-known films from mainland China and Hong Kong.

"Over the last 50 years, Taiwan has developed a culture of its own that these films document and investigate," she said. "This gift gives a deeper understanding of Taiwan, as both a Chinese culture and a distinct culture in its own right."

Already, some faculty members at UNC and Duke are planning to incorporate films from the collection into their courses and research, Bolick said.

"One real benefit of this collection is that TECO arranged to have many of the films subtitled, even though that’s not the way they were originally distributed," she said. "Director Wang is such a key figure, but so few students have the language skills to study his work that faculty haven’t been able to teach his films."

Wang Tong is considered part of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement of the 1980s and 1990s, when filmmakers changed focus from cinematic retellings of traditional literature and began portraying contemporary class relationships, social structures and economics, Bolick said.

But TECO’s Web site notes that Wang’s style is "distinctive and very different from most of the Taiwan New Cinema directors. Ranging from historical drama to political satire to romantic comedy to social commentary to martial arts action, Wang’s works vary widely in terms of subjects and genres."

"Straw Man" and "Banana Paradise" are the first two parts of a trilogy that also includes "Hill of No Return" (1992). The films portray Taiwanese life from the final years of World War II and the waning Japanese occupation of Taiwan through the late 1980s.

After the festival, "Straw Man" and "Banana Paradise" will become part of the Media Resources Collection in the House Undergraduate Library at UNC, where students, faculty, and members of the public will be able to watch them. The rest of the new collection, including "Hill of No Return," will be made available as the library staff restores each film.

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/wangtong.jpg

Suggested cutline: Film director Wang Tong will speak at the New Taiwanese Film Festival, April 21 and 22 in Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Library contact: Judith Panitch or Diane Strauss, (919) 962-1301, panitch@email.unc.edu, dstrauss@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589