Abstract

Taiwan New Cinema (Taiwan xin dianying, or TNC) is a cinematic movement that emerged in the 1980s just as democracy was introduced to the island. Its impact cannot be overstated: TNC not only expanded cultural frontiers, but also made possible multiple and alternative onscreen representations of Taiwanese identities and historiographies. Since Hou Hsiao-hsien – one of the most respected TNC filmmakers – received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his masterpiece, A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi), Taiwan New Cinema has carved a niche status in the global markets of arthouse cinema and ‘stands tall in the history of world cinema’ (Lim 2013: 161). Today, the work of cinematic auteurs associated with the first and second waves of Taiwan New Cinema 1 continues to attract accolade at prestigious film festivals. Recent examples include the Best Director Award for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (Nie yin niang) at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize for Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (Jiao you) at the 70th Venice International Film Festival in 2013 (see Mello, Vitali, and Pollacchi in this volume). On the other hand, Taiwan’s film industry experienced serious setbacks when the domestic commercial film market became completely dominated by Hollywood in the 1990s (Curtin 2007: 86). The long-term decline continued into the twenty-first century until the appearance of Wei Te-sheng’s debut feature film, Cape No.7 (Haijiao qihao, 2008), which became the most profitable locally made movie in Taiwan’s history (see Ma, Hu, Chan & Willis, Wang, and Berry in this volume).