Following a month-long retrospective in March of one of the movement’s most beloved filmmakers –Cannes 2000 Best Director winner Edward Yang (Yi Yi) – the BFI continues its deep dive into one of East Asian cinema’s most remarkable filmmaking movements this April with Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.
Spearheaded in the early 80s by young directors like Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwan New Cinema movement found a new generation of filmmakers striving to tell authentic tales of quotidian life amidst rapid urbanisation and growth in Taiwan. Rejecting blockbuster melodramas and Hong Kong martial fantasies, this new wave emphasised social realism, aesthetic richness, and the foregrounding of ordinary, working-class individuals to striking effect. The result was a naturalistic and deeply human brand of storytelling that would resonate far beyond Taiwan’s borders.
“It captured a very special period in 80s Taiwan in terms of modernity, cosmopolitanism and internationalism,” says programmer Hyun Jin Cho, who feels that the films’ “exceptional” and contemporary visuals have underpinned their enduring appeal. The progressive foregrounding of women’s stories and long-running collaborations with talented female writers and performers, meanwhile, is a core focus of the BFI’s new season – which goes beyond the movement’s most celebrated and world-renowned works to showcase highlights lesser-known in the UK.
Aided by insight from programmer Cho – as well as directors Chen Kun-hou and Huang Yu-shan – Dazed unpacks the mercurial film programme below, exploring the timeless and nostalgic allure of Taiwan New Cinema.
One of the headline works of the BFI’s new season is undoubtedly Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness. The winner of the Venice Golden Lion in 1989, this profound historical drama was the first Taiwanese film to achieve a major international honour – a symbolic triumph for the wider filmmaking collective, says Cho, that channels many of the elements they had set out to explore at the start. Despite its considerable significance in bringing Taiwanese cinema to global attention, the film has been largely unavailable in the decades since its release. The timing of this new restoration is poignant: Hou’s family announced his retirement from filmmaking in late 2023 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Set in the 40s following the end of World War Two, and told through the eyes of a humble family, A City of Sadness tells the story of Taiwan’s painful transformation under the new Chinese Nationalist government following half a century of Japanese rule. As intellectuals bemoan newfound corruption and widespread unemployment, innocent men like deaf-mute photographer Lin Wen-ching (Tony Leung) are targeted by the Kuomintang in a period of widespread political repression.
As the first film to openly allude to the ‘February 28 Incident’ of 1947 – which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, and led to decades of repression now known as the ‘White Terror’ – A City of Sadness was a watershed production in Taiwanese filmmaking; it debuted only two years after the martial law imposed in the film was lifted. Methodically executed via fixed-angle long-takes, and mostly confined to a domestic setting, this “intimate epic” is full of “richness and detail in the very small moments,” says Cho.
“Two extremely talented filmmakers led the movement, and their film language is quite exceptional,” says Cho. If one of those is Hou Hsiao-hsien, the other is undoubtedly Edward Yang, a “maverick” former computer engineer recognised for masterpieces A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000), both of which are widely considered among the greatest films of all time.
“He’s such a humanist,” says Cho, who describes how Yang always believed that the story and characters should dictate the filmmaking style – and not the opposite. “He just wanted the story to speak, with a deep empathy,” she says. “He always said his films are a love letter to his friends, and that intimacy is there in every film.”
Yang sadly died in 2007, leaving behind seven stunning features, one anthology short, and one TV film (Duckweed). Of this limited canon, the visually stunning Taipei Story serves as a testament to the movement’s highly collaborative nature.
So brightly have the films of Yang and Hou burned on the international stage that wider New Taiwan Cinema treasures have long been overshadowed. Out of the Blue came just a year after Chen Kun-hou won Best Feature and Best Director for Growing Up at the Golden Horse Awards (the ‘Oscars’ of Chinese-language cinema) – and is one of a clutch of precious gems receiving their European premieres via the BFI’s new programme.
Co-written by Hou and long-time collaborator Chu Tʽien-wen (Taipei Story; A City of Sadness), Out of the Blue is a mellow tale of a 17-year-old student who, while striving to meet the expectations of his strict parents in school, begins romancing a beautiful girl on a trip to the coast – only for her to disappear shortly thereafter. As the film flows at a glacial pace, fixed shots of dusty baseball fields, lapping waves, and boxy TVs in cramped apartments linger, inviting introspection as eyes are drawn to pastel-coloured clothes, and ears to the ambient sounds of the city.
“It was the only time in my 60-year career that I made a film I truly wanted to make,” Chen tells Dazed, describing this modest work as one he “truly adores”. “I’d always wondered if I could create a film with minimal dialogue, using only emotions and affects on-screen. I endeavoured to let these drive the progression of the storyline, approaching an unacceptable incident with calmness, tolerance and understanding.”
“He’s very gentle and warm, but quite softly radical in the ways he thinks about female bodies,” says Cho of director Chen. This empathetic quality is shown vividly in My Favourite Season, a luminous, gender-subverting romantic drama that charms while delivering an effective critique of the patriarchy.
Starring legendary Taiwanese screen icon Sylvia Chang (That Day, On the Beach), the movie follows beautiful young professional Liu, the only “girl” in her family, who defies all expectations to carve out a career in the big city – only to leave her job after an affair with her married boss. Headstrong, she decides to keep their unborn child but seeks a new husband so that her baby can inherit a paternal surname (and avoid the social stigma of illegitimacy) – “after that, I will divorce,” she states clearly.
Contract in hand, Liu enters a short-term marriage of convenience with Bi (Jonathan Lee), an affable softie with thick-rimmed glasses, several tiny exotic pets, and an unfortunate tendency to leave his keys in his car. But as this transactional couple keep up appearances – strolling through flower meadows and palm-lined villages in the countryside – their companionship blossoms, hinting at a light dilemma to come.
Director Chen Kun-hou was the cinematographer who brought much visual shine to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early work, including the multi-director anthology film The Sandwich Man, and coming-of-age drama The Boys From Fengkuei (both 1983).
The Boys From Fengkuei follows a group of Taiwanese lads from the small fishing settlement of Penghu as they set off for bustling Kaohsiung in search of work and girls. And in its emphasis on fixed long-shots and sumptuous natural environments, this “important turning point in Hou’s film career” establishes much of the style that would become his signature in the years to come. Chen was instrumental in that.
“The cinematography must create a distinct contrast between lifestyles in the two locations,” Chen tells Dazed. He emphasises how his use of light and shadow helped compose their distinct characteristics: “The sunlight in Penghu appears pale and high-contrast, and even at dusk, the sky stays bright. The essence of life here feels desolate and faint.” In Kaohsiung, meanwhile: “We filmed on streets filled with crowds of people, with the vast cityscape visible from high-rise buildings. They envisioned the potential for future development here, where the dreams of success and wealth were within reach.”
Celebrating its UK premiere on the 40th anniversary of its Taiwanese release is the crowning achievement of Chang Yi – a director lesser known in the West but instrumental in the rise of New Taiwan Cinema. He is particularly significant for his championing of women-centred stories, and his collaborations with female writers (like his then-wife Hsiao Sa).
Chang was one of the four first-time filmmakers whose vignettes comprised the 1982 anthology In Our Time – a production widely regarded as the movement’s starting point that also marked the debut of Edward Yang. Full of exquisitely composed shots capturing joyous gatherings, quiet confrontations, and intimate pledges between members of a downtrodden family, Kuei-Mei tells the story of a woman facing hardship after marrying a gambling-addicted widower in mid-century Taiwan. Told across 30 years via humble homesteads, commercial kitchens and noisy textile factories, it’s a tale of quiet resilience in a conservative society, where the ambition of opening a humble local restaurant feels like an almost unattainable dream.
Huang Yu-shan’s romantic drama Autumn Tempest was planned as a 30-minute short, but when acclaimed Korean actress Kang Soo-yeon joined the production it was expanded into a full feature (she’d won the top acting prize at Venice the previous year for The Surrogate Woman). The story of a city boy sent to a countryside temple to bury himself in his studies – only to fall in love with a beautiful woman named Su-pi –ended up being a box office hit in Taiwan; it’s never been screened in the West until now.
More than simple melodrama, Autumn Tempest foregrounds the country’s evolving modernity and internationalism: student Wen-hsiang, arriving from a Taipei dominated by neon signs and noisy pachinko parlours, sings Stevie Wonder in the shower and bemuses temple patrons with his Nescafé instant coffee (“It’s so bitter! Like Chinese medicine!” one woman winces). But it’s also notable for its progressive depiction of womanhood—which prompted widespread media discussion on ideas of the body and sexuality ahead of release, thereby ramping up public interest, recalls the director.
“This story emphasises women’s autonomy over their bodies,” Huang tells Dazed, highlighting how Su-pi’s “inner longings and awareness as a woman” challenged deeply rooted societal beliefs relating to child-bearing as the ultimate goal of marriage. The director, who later founded the feminist Women Make Waves film festival, later summarised the movie’s symbolism in an article titled ‘Sex, Buddha, and Wind’. These three elements, she says, represent the primal desires, traditional social norms, and disruptive environmental forces that intertwine to form the film’s dramatic core.
Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema is running throughout April 2025 at London’s BFI