Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals, by Beth Tsai (East Asia Center)

Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals (2023) by Beth Tsai offers accounts of the film festival’s role in both commissioning and exhibiting films, examining film aesthetics influenced by directors’ diasporic identities, moving across different regions and nations, such as Malaysia, France, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan, to complement the scope of transnational cinema. The author adopts a revisionist approach to Taiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–89; the second wave, 1990 onward) and considers New Cinema carried the legacy of taiyupian (commercial Taiwanese-language cinema, 1955–80) with their aspirations and appropriations of world cinema, while simultaneously argue the New Cinema movement and its voices of resistance have been extended by immigrant filmmakers that were initially excluded from the designation of “Taiwanese.” Apart from recognizing the marginalized voices, the book spotlights the productive role women have played as discursive mediators of the cultural imaginary of the nation, the auteur, and the art of slow cinema.