Taiwanese Cinema: The Person Speaking Beside the Screen, and a Film History That Died and Came Back to Life

30-second overview: Taiwanese cinema has been declared dead at least three times: the golden age of Taiwanese-language films was strangled; local audiences left after New Cinema; and in 2003, domestic films accounted for only 0.36% of Taiwan’s box office. Each time, it came back to life. Each life and death circled the same question: whose Taiwan should appear on screen, and in whose language? From the benshi improvising dialogue in Taiwanese in 1930s theaters, to Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan, which triggered more than a thousand Taiwanese-language films in 1956, to Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang winning major European festival prizes, Ang Lee twice standing on the Oscar stage, and Wei Te-sheng making the NT$530 million Cape No. 7 in five languages in 2008: this is not a straight line from bad to good. It is the story of Taiwan repeatedly taking back the right to “use its own languages and perform its own faces.”

In a Taiwanese theater in 1930, the people on screen could not speak. The person beside the screen could.

He was called a benshi. Halfway through a film, he stood beside the curtain and used Taiwanese to improvise the plot, the characters’ inner thoughts, and even his own views on current affairs, line by line, for the audience below. That year, Taiwan had about sixty benshi: forty-one Japanese and nineteen Taiwanese. Each had to pass an examination administered by the police affairs section before practicing professionally¹. The most popular, Chan Tian-ma, narrated Kurama Tengu in Dadaocheng to packed houses; Lu Ping-ting of the Cultural Association narrated Arctic Exploration in Chiayi, inserted political commentary as he spoke, and was stopped on the spot by Japanese police².

That was the earliest voice of Taiwanese cinema: not on the filmstrip, but in a living person’s mouth. And that voice spoke Taiwanese.

The story of the filmstrip itself, from the beginning, did not belong entirely to Taiwanese people. In 1925, Liu Hsi-yang and the Taiwan Cinema Research Society made Whose Fault Is It?, regarded as the first narrative film produced by Taiwanese people themselves³. By 1943, however, the colonial-government-led Sayon’s Bell cast the popular star Li Xianglan and turned the real drowning of an Atayal girl into kominka imperialization propaganda, summoning Indigenous youth to serve Japan⁴. From live narration to imperialization propaganda, in the first forty years of Taiwanese cinema, what was said on screen, and who got to say it, were almost never decisions the people on the island could make for themselves.

The 1943 _Sayon’s Bell, starring the major star Li Xianglan, is a representative late-Japanese-rule imperialization film. From benshi beside motion pictures to colonial-government propaganda, at the starting point of Taiwanese cinema, what was said on screen was almost entirely decided by others. Photo: Shochiku / Man’ei (public domain)._

Ninety years later, on the same island, a film called Cape No. 7 let five languages speak at once in theaters: Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, English, and Paiwan⁵. Across those ninety years, Taiwanese cinema was declared dead several times, and came back to life several times. Each death and rebirth looked, on the surface, like a matter of box office, censorship, or markets. At its core, it was always the same question: whose Taiwan should the screen speak of, in whose language, and who gets to appear on screen?

This article is not about “how Taiwanese cinema went from bad to good.” That is a line too convenient, and too false. The real version is a history repeatedly strangled and repeatedly revived.

More Than a Thousand Films, Remembered by No One

Start with something most Taiwanese people do not know: Taiwan was once the world’s third-largest producer of narrative films, behind only Japan and India⁶.

That was the era of Taiwanese-language cinema. In January 1956, the gezaixi opera film Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan opened in Taipei. Directed by Ho Chi-ming and produced by Chen Cheng-san, head of the Mailiao Gongyueshe gezaixi troupe, it was Taiwan’s first 35 mm Taiwanese-language gezaixi film. Its cost was modest; its box office reached about NT$1.2 million, more than triple its budget⁷. One film proved that “Taiwanese films made by Taiwanese people for Taiwanese people” could sell tickets, and the craze exploded.

Over the next decade-plus, Taiwanese-language films grew like weeds. In 1958, output surged to 76 films, the first peak⁸. Director Hsin Chi alone made 12 films in 1969⁹. In Yingge, Lin Tuan-chiu built his own Hushan Studio and founded Yufeng Film Company, hoping to turn Taiwanese-language film into a properly scaled industry¹⁰. The genres were also dazzlingly varied: gezaixi, melodrama, the comedy Brother Wang and Brother Liu Tour Taiwan, the spy film Number One following the 007 craze, and the children’s fantasy The Fantasy of Deer Warrior¹¹.

How many were made in all? That question itself is a miniature of Taiwanese-language cinema’s fate: no one can give an exact number. The education site of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) says “more than a thousand”; a Taipei Times report estimates “between 1,200 and 1,500”; academic research even gives figures of “more than 2,000”¹². Why such a wide range? Because there is no consensus on the start and end years, whether to include Amoy-dialect films, or whether films submitted for review or actually screened should count. More fundamentally, the overwhelming majority of prints have been lost. The 1,238 items held by TFAI are “the number still preserved today,” not the total output of the period; the institute itself says the surviving films amount to less than one-fifth of the original output¹³.

An industry that was once the world’s third-largest producer of narrative films no longer has most of its works, and cannot even count its total output. This is not just a matter of filmstock decaying.

The common explanation is that Taiwanese-language films were “crudely made,” so they were naturally eliminated by the market and forgotten by history. That narrative is smooth, but it reverses cause and effect. In A Film History of Reluctance, historian Su Chih-heng offers a different version: Taiwanese-language cinema did not rot to death on its own; it was strangled¹⁴.

What strangled it was policy, not audiences. In 1957, revisions to the “Film Stock Deposit Tax Import Regulations” excluded Taiwanese-language films from tax exemptions. In other words, people making Taiwanese-language films had to pay more than others even for filmstock¹⁵. Beginning in 1959, officials restricted Taiwanese-language benshi; in 1962, Taiwan Television began broadcasting, moving audiences who watched gezaixi and listened to Taiwanese stories into the living room; Mandarin films received subsidies, while Taiwanese-language films did not¹⁶. Su Chih-heng’s argument is sharper still: by controlling the import of filmstock, the government actively produced the stereotype “Taiwanese = black-and-white = vulgar.” When Mandarin films could use color and widescreen while Taiwanese-language films were forced to remain black-and-white, the label “cheap” became something manufactured, not an innate quality of Taiwanese-language film¹⁴.

📝 Curator’s Note: The impression many people have today that “Taiwanese-language films were rough” may itself be the result of an earlier round of policy. An industry was denied the conditions for upgrading: color, funding, the flow of talent. Then its cheapness was used as the reason for eliminating it. That is a perfect closed loop. So the real point of “more than a thousand films, remembered by no one” is “why did it become something no one remembers?” Forgetting is sometimes a decision, not the natural result of time.

In 1969, Mandarin film output surpassed Taiwanese-language film output for the first time¹⁷. The last Taiwanese-language film was Chen San and Wu Niang, starring Yang Li-hua, in 1981¹⁸. Only in the 1990s did researchers begin rescuing this history. Not until 2017 did King’s College London hold the first English-language academic conference devoted to Taiwanese-language cinema¹⁹. A narrative-film industry once ranked third in the world had to wait until thirty years after its death, half a world away, before people finally began to study it seriously as history.

Healthy, Realist, and Off Limits

As Taiwanese-language films exited, the screen was taken over by another language.

In September 1954, the Agricultural Education Film Company and Taiwan Film Company merged to form Central Motion Picture Corporation, or CMPC, using equipment from U.S. aid²⁰. Mandarin films gained an industrial base, and policy determined their direction. In 1963, Kung Hong became CMPC general manager and introduced a line called “Healthy Realism.” He gave a very precise definition: “healthy means didactic; realism means rural”²¹.

Those six words are worth pausing over. They mean: film should be realist, but only in the clean, morally instructive rural sense, not in showing society’s dark side or real conflict. Oyster Girl in 1964 became the emblem of this line. It was CMPC’s first self-produced color widescreen film (note: not “Taiwan’s first color film”), co-directed by Lee Chia and Li Hsing, and won Best Feature Film at the 11th Asian Film Festival²². Beautiful Duckling continued the same line the next year.

Beyond Healthy Realism, three other forces were operating in Mandarin cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.

The first was Chiung Yao melodrama. Beginning with Li Hsing’s Four Loves in 1965, about twenty-five Chiung Yao adaptations were made within five years, creating an entire generation of stars²³. The most famous were the “Two Chins and Two Lins”: Chin Han, Charlie Chin, Brigitte Lin, and Joan Lin. Brigitte Lin debuted in Outside the Window in 1973 and later became a legend of Sinophone cinema; Joan Lin won the Golden Horse Award for Best Actress in 1979²⁴. Chiung Yao’s tears were a shared youth for many people of that era.

The second force was wuxia. In 1967, King Hu’s Dragon Inn became Taiwan’s annual box-office champion and opened a wuxia-film craze that lasted ten years²⁵. King Hu did not merely sell tickets; he made wuxia into an aesthetic. In 1975, his A Touch of Zen won the Technical Grand Prize at the 28th Cannes Film Festival, making it the second Sinophone film to win at Cannes after Li Han-hsiang’s The Magnificent Concubine in 1962²⁶. One detail captures the position of Taiwanese cinema at the time: A Touch of Zen attended the festival under the name of “Hong Kong,” by invitation of French film critics, not through a recommendation by the Taiwanese government²⁶. King Hu’s wuxia language of bamboo forests, empty space, and rhythm later influenced Tsui Hark and Ang Lee; the bamboo-forest scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a tribute to him²⁷.

The third force was political-propaganda patriotic film. In 1971, the Republic of China withdrew from the United Nations, and public morale wavered. One of the government’s responses, in TFAI’s words, was to make films “to stabilize public sentiment and promote government actions”²⁸. The 1974 Everlasting Glory was pushed by political-warfare staffer Wang Sheng, directed by Ting Shan-hsi, and starred Ko Chun-hsiung; it was followed by Eight Hundred Heroes in 1976 and Heroes of the Eastern Skies in 1977²⁹. In many people’s memories, these films are linked to “schools booking entire screenings.” To be honest, however, no first-hand documentary evidence has been found for “compulsory school bookings.” What can be confirmed is only that they were often rebroadcast on television during holidays³⁰.

📝 Curator’s Note: From Taiwanese-language films to Healthy Realism to patriotic films, if we take “what can be said on screen, and what is allowed to be said” as the main line, the history of Taiwanese cinema has actually been answering the same question all along. The difference is that the answers were written by policy, not by audiences or creators. The problem of Taiwanese-language films was “you are not allowed to make films properly in this language.” The problem of Healthy Realism was “you may write only this one kind of reality.” The problem of patriotic film was “what is film for?” Language, subject matter, and function: three gates, opening and closing in turn.

The origin of the name “Golden Horse” is also worth noting. In 1957, private organizers once used the name “Golden Horse Awards” for a Taiwanese-language film festival, held only once³¹. In 1962, the Government Information Office founded the official Golden Horse Awards, nominally restricted to Mandarin films, and even deliberately scheduled the ceremony around Chiang Kai-shek’s birthday³¹. The same name belonged first to Taiwanese-language cinema, then was incorporated into Mandarin cinema. That itself is a small footnote to the language politics of the era.

The Apple That Was Nearly Peeled Away

In 1982, CMPC made a decision that did not look especially important at the time, but in retrospect changed everything: it let a group of unknown young directors make films.

That year’s In Our Time consisted of four segments, directed by Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, and Chang Yi³². The next year, The Sandwich Man adapted Huang Chun-ming’s stories in three segments directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zeng Zhuang-xiang, and Wan Jen³³. Taiwan New Cinema began with these two films.

But New Cinema immediately ran into the old gate. In The Taste of Apples, Wan Jen’s segment in The Sandwich Man, its portrayal of lower-class life drew intervention from the Kuomintang’s Cultural Work Association, which demanded cuts. This became the famous “Apple-Peeling Incident”³⁴. Under pressure from public opinion, that apple was eventually preserved. A small pair of scissors nearly cut away Taiwanese cinema’s newly emerging ability to tell the truth seriously. On January 24, 1987, the “Taiwan New Cinema Manifesto,” drafted by Chan Hung-chih, was published in the China Times “Human Realm” supplement, effectively giving the movement a formal declaration³⁵.

Three New Cinema names later became world-class directors.

In 1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien won the Venice Golden Lion for _A City of Sadness, putting Taiwanese cinema for the first time at the summit of the world’s three major film festivals. Photo: Gorup de Besanez, CC BY-SA 4.0._

Hou Hsiao-hsien went from The Boys from Fengkuei, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, and Dust in the Wind onward, turning Taiwan’s countryside, memory, and time into a language of very long, very slow shots³⁶. On September 15, 1989, his A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion at the 46th Venice Film Festival: the first time a Taiwanese film won the top prize at one of the three major festivals, Cannes, Venice, and Berlin³⁷. More remarkably, the film directly addressed the 228 Incident, still a sensitive subject at the time, using the rise and fall of one family to sidewrite that history³⁷. How highly was Hou’s long-take aesthetic regarded internationally? Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami strongly supported The Puppetmaster; Akira Kurosawa reportedly watched it four times and said he could not have made it; Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda was also deeply influenced by Hou³⁸.

Trailer for the 4K digital restoration of _A City of Sadness. In 1989, it won the Golden Lion in Venice and brought 228 seriously onto the big screen for the first time. In Taiwanese theaters that same year, however, domestic films were losing their audience._

Edward Yang took another path. He filmed the city, urban alienation, and violence. After That Day, on the Beach and The Terrorizers, his 1991 A Brighter Summer Day ran 237 minutes in its original version and was adapted from a real juvenile murder case in 1961³⁹. In 2000, his Yi Yi won Best Director at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival (note: Best Director, not the Palme d’Or)⁴⁰. On June 29, 2007, he died of colon cancer at the age of fifty-nine⁴¹. His films influenced the American director Paul Thomas Anderson and Hirokazu Kore-eda⁴².

Trailer for the 4K restoration of Edward Yang’s _Yi Yi (Janus Films). It won Best Director at Cannes in 2000 and later entered the Sight & Sound greatest-films poll at No. 90._

The third was Tsai Ming-liang. Beginning with Rebels of the Neon God in 1992, he turned his camera toward loneliness, desire, and time slowed almost to a standstill⁴³. In 1994, his Vive L’Amour won the Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Film Festival, sharing the prize with Before the Rain; the jury president that year was David Lynch⁴⁴. A widely circulated error needs correction here: Vive L’Amour won the Golden Lion, not a “critics’ award”⁴⁴. Later, The River and Stray Dogs continued to win festival prizes, and Face in 2009 became the first film collected by the Louvre⁴⁵.

Another frequently misstated claim about these three directors’ place in film history also needs correction. A common version says “three Taiwanese films appear in the all-time top 100 of the French Cahiers du Cinéma.” That is wrong. Checking the 2008 Cahiers du Cinéma top-100 list shows no Taiwanese film at all⁴⁶. The list that did write Taiwanese cinema into film history was the British Sight & Sound 2022 greatest-films poll: Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day ranked No. 78, and Yi Yi ranked No. 90⁴⁷.

Awarded, but Unwatched

Here comes the most counterintuitive turn in the entire history of Taiwanese cinema, and also the part most easily turned into poisonous self-help rhetoric.

New Cinema won the Golden Lion and Best Director in Europe; Taiwanese cinema was seen by the world for the first time. But in Taiwanese theaters during the same period, domestic film was dying. Beginning in 1996, annual local film output fell to 15 to 20 films, with a market share of only one to two percent⁴⁸. The bottom was 2003: that year, only about 15 domestic films were made in Taiwan; total box office was roughly NT$15 million, accounting for 0.36% of Taiwan’s total box office, less than one percent⁴⁹.

0.36%. Say that number aloud: among one hundred Taiwanese people entering movie theaters, not even one was there to see a domestic film. And in those same years, the names Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang were shining at Cannes and Venice. One island’s cinema bloomed beyond the wall and withered within it.

A popular explanation therefore emerged, and it sounded smooth: “It was all New Cinema’s fault. Those art films were boring and incomprehensible, drove audiences away, and killed domestic film.”

That claim deserves to be taken seriously, because real resentment lies behind it. Many people genuinely entered theaters, did not understand the films, fell asleep, and never again went to see a domestic film. But blaming the entire downturn on New Cinema simplifies a multi-causal collapse into one scapegoat.

New Cinema did create distance between some audiences and mainstream commercial viewing habits; there is no need to evade that. But the collapse of domestic film in the 1990s and 2000s had more structural causes acting at the same time: Hollywood blockbusters comprehensively captured Taiwan’s market; after Taiwan joined the WTO, import quotas for foreign films were loosened; videotapes and cable television changed how people watched films; local capital withdrew from the film industry; and theater channels were also controlled by imported films⁵⁰. An industry was crushed by this entire set of forces together. It was not driven away by a handful of award-winning art films.

📝 Curator’s Note: The claim that “New Cinema killed domestic film” is attractive because it turns a complex market collapse into a story with a face: villains (directors whose films you cannot understand) and victims (audiences who cannot understand them). But the truth usually has no face. Treating Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang as the culprits behind the decline of domestic film is effectively asking a group of creators to take responsibility for the collapse of an entire industrial ecosystem. Their actual cost was different: they won world-class awards, but could not turn them into local audiences. For those dozen-plus years, glory and the market were completely severed.

This was Taiwanese cinema’s second death. Taiwanese-language film was strangled by policy; this time, domestic film was drowned by the market. The difference is that different deaths require different mechanisms of revival. Taiwanese-language cinema never truly came back. This time, however, someone was waiting for a way to invite audiences back into theaters.

To Reach the World’s Screens, One First Had to Leave the Island

During those dozen-plus years of withering at home, one Taiwan-born director chose another route: he walked beyond the wall, and walked the farthest.

Ang Lee photographed at the Venice Film Festival in 2009. When domestic films were almost invisible in local theaters, this Taiwanese director was twice crowned in Hollywood’s highest hall. Photo: nicolas genin, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Ang Lee. His “Father Knows Best” trilogy, Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman, was made from 1991 to 1994; The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear at the 43rd Berlin Film Festival in 1993⁵¹. He then went west to Hollywood. In 2001, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won four prizes at the 73rd Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film; it also became the first non-English-language film in U.S. history to pass US$100 million at the box office, earning US$213.5 million worldwide⁵². In 2006, Brokeback Mountain made him the first Asian winner of the Academy Award for Best Director; in 2013, Life of Pi made him the first Asian director to win the award twice⁵³.

Ang Lee’s existence complicates the phrase “history of Taiwanese cinema.” When Taiwanese films were nearly absent from local theaters, a Taiwanese director was using English, Mandarin, and various languages at Hollywood’s highest level to film stories for the whole world. He is a pride of Taiwanese cinema, but in a sense his success came precisely because he left the local market that was withering. This is another answer to the question of “getting onto the screen”: sometimes, to get onto the world’s screens, one first had to leave one’s own island.

Five Languages Returned to the Screen Together

On August 22, 2008, a film called Cape No. 7 opened. No one anticipated what would happen next.

Its director, Wei Te-sheng, was not yet a major name. To raise the NT$50 million budget, he mortgaged his own house and borrowed NT$30 million⁵⁴. Then the film made NT$530 million across Taiwan, including NT$230 million in Taipei and NT$300 million outside Taipei⁵⁵. It topped the box office for eight consecutive weeks. Local film market share rose from the 0.36% bottom of 2003 to 12.09% in 2008, a more than thirtyfold increase⁵⁶.

But the most important thing about Cape No. 7 was not its box-office number. It was what it brought back to the screen.

Five languages speak in this film: Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, English, and Paiwan⁵. A frustrated band vocalist speaks Mandarin mixed with Taiwanese; the township representative opens his mouth in earthy Taiwanese; a love letter spanning sixty years is written in Japanese; and Paiwan, an Indigenous language, is also heard. This is neither a “Mandarin film” nor a “Taiwanese-language film.” It is simply Taiwan as it already is: many languages mixed together, none crushing the others.

Now pull the camera back to the beginning. In the theater of 1930, the benshi used Taiwanese to dub a silent screen. Nearly eighty years passed in between: Taiwanese-language cinema was strangled, Mandarin policy dominated, and New Cinema quietly brought dialects back into art films. By Cape No. 7 in 2008, the screen could finally, with full confidence, speak five languages at once, and people across Taiwan lined up to watch. Taiwanese cinema’s third revival was, in essence, a restoration of linguistic rights: Taiwanese people heard again on the big screen the sounds of how they spoke in ordinary life.

Official trailer for _Cape No. 7. Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, English, and Paiwan share the stage; in the summer of 2008, the film invited Taiwanese audiences back into theaters._

📝 Curator’s Note: Cape No. 7 is often questioned by elites as “commercially successful, but artistically below the masters of New Cinema.” That criticism is not wrong, but it asks the wrong question. What Cape No. 7 needed to solve was never “how deep can a film be?” It was “are Taiwanese people willing to pay to enter theaters and watch their own stories?” That is exactly what New Cinema had been unable to solve for more than a decade. Its historical significance is not in how good it is, but in what it proved: a film using Taiwan’s own languages and telling stories about Taiwan’s own people could win acclaim and sell tickets at the same time. The thing denied to Taiwanese-language cinema half a century earlier, making good films in one’s own language and still selling them, was reclaimed by Cape No. 7.

Wei Te-sheng did not stop. In 2011, he made Seediq Bale, produced by John Woo, about the 1930 Wushe Incident, telling that history of anti-Japanese resistance from an Indigenous perspective. The film cost about NT$720 million; its two parts, The Sun Flag and The Rainbow Bridge, together earned about NT$810 million across Taiwan⁵⁷. It represented Taiwan in the race for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and made the nine-film shortlist, but did not enter the final five⁵⁸. That year, local film market share rose to 17.46%, the historic high at the time⁵⁶. In 2014, he produced Umin Boya’s KANO, about the Chiayi Agricultural and Forestry School baseball team reaching Koshien in 1931⁵⁹.

The wave raised by Cape No. 7 went far beyond Wei Te-sheng. It marked the return of genre films as a whole. Doze Niu’s Monga came in 2010; Giddens Ko’s You Are the Apple of My Eye came in 2011, earning NT$425 million across Taiwan and becoming one of the highest-grossing Chinese-language films in Hong Kong history; and Our Times earned NT$410 million across Taiwan in 2015⁶⁰. Taiwanese people again became accustomed to “going to theaters to see domestic films.” Domestic film came back to life, and this time, it learned how to speak to audiences.

The Decade When Domestic Film Was Box-Office Poison, and Its Opposite

Rewinding the timeline makes clear what Cape No. 7 actually saved.

“Domestic films = box-office poison” was the real collective impression Taiwanese society had of domestic cinema from the 1990s to 2007⁶¹. Distributors were afraid to invest, theaters were afraid to schedule them, and audiences did not want to watch them, forming a dead loop no one could turn. It was an era when saying to a friend, “I’m going to see a domestic film,” would get you laughed at.

But this decade-long “poison” label and the earlier stigma that Taiwanese-language films were “crudely made” were actually two versions of the same mechanism: after an industry lost the conditions it needed, its results were used backward to define it. Taiwanese-language cinema had filmstock and capital pulled away; domestic film after New Cinema had market and distribution pulled away. The difference is that the latter eventually received the antidote of Cape No. 7, while the former did not.

That is also why understanding the history of Taiwanese cinema cannot mean looking only at award-winning masters. A complete history of domestic film includes the industry of Taiwanese-language films, the policy of Healthy Realism, the genres of wuxia and patriotic film, the art of New Cinema, the poison label of the downturn, and the revival after Cape No. 7. All of these together are the real shape of Taiwanese cinema. Selecting only the four world-class names Hou, Yang, Tsai, and Lee is like looking only at the brightest points within a much larger history.

The Present: Awards, Box Office, and the Politics of One Award

After Cape No. 7, Taiwanese cinema entered a more mature and also more complicated phase.

On the auteur side, Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun won Best Narrative Feature at the 56th Golden Horse Awards in 2019, represented Taiwan for the Oscars, and reached the fifteen-film shortlist, but did not make the final five⁶². Huang Hsin-yao’s The Great Buddha+ won five prizes at the 54th Golden Horse Awards in 2017, the same year Yang Ya-che’s The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful won Best Narrative Feature⁶³.

Official trailer for _The Great Buddha+. Huang Hsin-yao used black-and-white images, Taiwanese narration, and a dashcam perspective to turn the absurdity of the social underclass into the biggest winner of the 2017 Golden Horse Awards._

Genre film also evolved. John Hsu’s 2019 Detention, adapted from Red Candle Games’ video game, turned the White Terror into a horror film and earned NT$259 million across Taiwan, becoming the year’s top-grossing domestic film⁶⁴. In 2023, Marry My Dead Body earned NT$363 million across Taiwan and reached No. 7 on Netflix’s global non-English film chart⁶⁵.

4K trailer for _Detention. It turned the White Terror into a video game, then into a hit horror film. Contemporary Taiwanese cinema began using the shell of genre film to carry histories that were once untouchable._

One especially unusual film deserves mention: Wong Ching-po’s 2023 The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon. In Taiwan it earned only NT$47 million, hardly a major hit. But after its 2024 release in China, it exploded, taking RMB 665 million at the box office⁶⁶. A Taiwanese film performed modestly in its own market but became a phenomenon across the Strait. That fact alone shows how delicate the cultural tension around contemporary Taiwanese film has become.

The theater itself, meanwhile, faces another crisis. Taiwan’s total cinema box office fell from about NT$10.1 billion in 2019 to about NT$6 billion in 2024, evaporating by 40%. Over the same period, Netflix’s streaming share in Taiwan surged to 83%⁶⁷. Audiences have not stopped watching. They have turned the living room back into the movie theater. This repeats the same script as Taiwan Television’s 1962 launch, which moved gezaixi audiences from theaters into their homes. Streaming platforms are also investing heavily in Taiwanese film and television content. Series such as Light the Night, Gold Leaf, The Magician on the Skywalk, and Seqalu: Formosa 1867 have redirected resources from the big screen to the small screen⁶⁸.

Finally, return to the award called Golden Horse.

In November 2018, at the 55th Golden Horse Awards, director Fu Yue’s documentary Our Youth in Taiwan won Best Documentary. On stage, she said: “I hope that one day, our country can be treated as a truly independent entity. This is my greatest wish as a Taiwanese person.”⁶⁹ Her words triggered a major Cross-Strait controversy. Ang Lee, who hosted the ceremony that night, later told reporters: “Taiwan is free and the film festival is open. You can say whatever you want to say.”⁷⁰ The next year, on August 7, 2019, China’s National Film Administration announced that it would suspend mainland Chinese films and personnel from participating in the Golden Horse Awards. China’s Golden Rooster Awards also deliberately scheduled its ceremony on the same day as the Golden Horse Awards⁷¹.

How to interpret this is for each person to decide. Taiwan.md’s role here is only to record the event clearly: an award once regarded as the neutral hall of Sinophone cinema became drawn into Cross-Strait political struggle because of one acceptance speech. And you may notice that the core of this controversy is actually the same as the core of the entire history of domestic film: on the screen, and on the stage, who should speak of what kind of Taiwan, in what identity?

Conclusion: They Have Been Shouting This for Seventy Years

Return to the benshi standing beside the screen at the beginning.

The image of him using Taiwanese to voice a silent film and the five languages sounding together in the theater during Cape No. 7 in 2008 are separated by nearly eighty years. During those eighty years, Taiwanese cinema was declared dead at least three times: Taiwanese-language films were strangled by policy; after New Cinema, domestic film was drowned by the market; during the decade-long slump, it was called box-office poison. Yet it came back to life again and again. Each revival was Taiwan reclaiming one thing: using its own languages, performing its own faces, and placing its own stories on screen.

So the next time you see another headline saying “Taiwanese cinema is dead again,” you may remember: they have been shouting that for seventy years.

References

• Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) Digital Museum and Taiwan Film History Education Network — primary materials on Taiwanese-language film catalogs, Healthy Realism, and political-propaganda patriotic films: tfai.openmuseum.tw, edumovie-tfai.org.tw
• Su Chih-heng, A Film History of Reluctance: The Fate of Taiwanese-language Films — key argument on how Taiwanese-language film was suppressed by policy and how the “black-and-white = vulgar” stereotype was manufactured
• Wikipedia entries on “Taiwanese cinema,” “Taiwanese-language cinema,” “Taiwan New Cinema,” “Golden Horse Awards,” and individual films — indices for years, award editions, and box-office figures, checked item by item against official sources
• Sight & Sound (BFI) 2022 greatest-films poll and Cahiers du Cinéma 2008 top 100 — verification of film-historical standing: bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound
• Taiwan Panorama, Variety, Business Today, and The Reporter — historical local-market-share figures, the Golden Horse political incident, and industry data

Image Sources

This article uses 4 images, all cached in public/article-images/art/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng (_Days_) — Photo: hinnk, CC BY-SA 3.0 (hero)
• Still from _Sayon’s Bell_ — Shochiku / Man’ei, public domain
• Hou Hsiao-hsien at the 1989 Venice Golden Lion ceremony — Photo: Gorup de Besanez, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Ang Lee at the 2009 Venice Film Festival — Photo: nicolas genin, CC BY-SA 2.0

Further Reading

• Hou Hsiao-hsien: the long-take master who won the Venice Golden Lion and brought 228 onto the screen
• Edward Yang: the urban observer whose two works entered the Sight & Sound greatest-films poll
• Tsai Ming-liang: the Venice Golden Lion winner who filmed slow cinema into the Louvre
• Ang Lee: from Taiwan to Hollywood, twice winner of the Academy Award for Best Director
• Wei Te-sheng: the person who made Cape No. 7 in five languages and revived domestic film
• Invisible Nation: another way Taiwan is seen in Vanessa Hope’s documentary