The 1st Los Angeles Taiwanese Film Festival

Cape No. 7, a debut feature by director Wei Te-Sheng, a former assistant director under the legendary Edward Yang, has just secured Taiwan's nomination as a contender for the next year's Best Foreign-language Film Oscar. With a mere $1.5 million budget, this new release is no Hou Hsiao-Hsien style art-house movie. It not only snapped up both the Jury's Award and the Audience's Choice Award at the Taipei International Film Festival earlier, but also outdid Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon and set a new box-office record in Taiwan—nearly four times its budget amount in gross revenue just in the opening month.

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The chance to view this blockbuster here in L.A. could be sooner than you would expect. The 1st Los Angeles Taiwanese Film Festival will take place from December 12th through the 14th at the UCLA James Bridges Theatre. Cape No. 7 will wrap up the three-day screening in the Sunday afternoon. A total of five feature films and four documentaries will be shown. The event will also include an opening introduction of the nine films and the Taiwanese cinema in general, a keynote speech on the social and cultural milieu in which those films were made, and a roundtable discussion about making a debut feature.

The film festival is being organized by TUF, in collaboration with UCLA and the Taipei Economic & Cultural Office in Los Angeles. The inaugural event will offer a representative yet diverse cross-section of Taiwan's contemporary cinema. The festival is expected to attract serious film buffs interested in the current state of Taiwanese film, as well as more casual fans eager to enjoy a top-notch slate of best Taiwanese films in recent years.

Other selected feature films are Do Over, Reflections, Chocolate Rap and Secret. Documentary selections include For More Sun, The Squid Daddy's Labor Room, Grandma's Hairpin and Viva Tonal (aka The Dance Age).

Cheng Yu-Chieh's amazingly accomplished debut feature Do Over, the grand prize jury's award and audience's choice award winner of the 8th Taipei International Film Festival, is a sophisticated piece in terms of its visual style and storytelling. The film, which has been favorably compared with Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, follows 5 characters through a series of playfully deconstructed time sequences, blurring the lines between reality andfantasy over the course of a New Year's Eve and the first day on a fresh calendar. It creates an ethereal world where questions of time and perception are explored through the rich, funny and complex lives of its characters.

Another highlight of the festival is the opening film Chocolate Rap. Set in southern Taiwan during the summer, the film tells the tale of a hip-pop dancer named Chocolate whose victory in a series of dance-offs earns him the admiration of manager Pachinko. Together, they work their way to the top of the street dance scene.

In contrast to the early 1980s'New Wave cinema, which focused on a realistic portrayal of everyday life, emerging directors in Taiwan have produced a great deal of genre-driven movies trying to reinvigorate the movie industry in Taiwan. Chocolate Rap is one of this new breed of films.

Director Lee Chi-yuan, a UCLA alumnus and now highly acclaimed screenwriter in Taiwan, was founding partner of a production company called New Island Entertainment in Los Angeles. He and his producer wife returned to Taiwan five years ago on a mission to broaden the horizons of local cinema. Collaboration with a Hollywood production crew has resulted in a movie that gives an international perspective on contemporary Taiwan. In Chocolate Rap, camera movements are unbounded, with meticulous attention to details of lighting, color and composition of each scene.

"I'm a cultured woman, traveling about footloose and fancy-free…” So begins a lilting tune from The Dance Age of Taiwan during the 1920s and 30s. This lively historical documentary explores an ear of early twentieth-century Taiwan, then under Japanese colonial rule, a time when young men and women moved to the rhythms of Western and Japanese music, dancing the waltz and foxtrot as they yearned for a fresh new world and free love. The film mixes engaging interviews with catchy songs, haunting period footage, and reenactments of the unrequited romance between the lovely chanteuse Sun Sun and her songwriter Chen Chun-yu.

Grandma's Hairpin looks into the unique life stories of veterans who are among some 500,000 soldiers who left their families and followed Chiang Kai-shek's retreat to Taiwan in 1949 while in their early 20s or late teens. By the time the government finally lifted the ban on private visit to China about 40 years later, they are in an awkward position where they can no longer adapt themselves to the living in China, while putting down their roots in Taiwan proved to be challenging.

For More Sun, another well-crafted documentary, chronicles the efforts of Professor Cheng and a group of mechanical engineering students at Taida (National Taiwan University) who have dreams to fly high and run fast with their hand-made vehicles. “When others were partying, we were welding,” one of the students recalls. “When others were spending time with their families, we were test-driving on campus.” The film follows Professor Cheng and the students as they devote six years of their lives to build FORMOSUN III, a world-class solar car, with the hope of entering the car into the 2005 World Solar Challenge held in Australia.

The three-day festival will be kicked off by an opening wine and hors d'oeuvres reception, and concluded with a formal closing reception. TUF, the initiator of the festival, has been engaged in cultural exchanges since 1986. Through collaboration and networking with other organizations and academic institutions, TUF has grown to become a leading Taiwanese American association in the United States to celebrate the Taiwanese cultural heritages and America's cultural diversity.

Presented by: TUF      TECO L.A.      UCLA Co-presented by: CCYP.com     Committee of 100      KPCC 89.3 FM      KPFK 90.7 FM LA 18/KSCI-TV      Sky Link TV      TA Junior Chamber of Commerce Taiwanese American Professionals      TECO Cultural Center, Los Angeles UCLA Taiwanese American Union      Visual Communications (VC Films) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gold Sponsors: Silver Sponsors: