In recent years, the overseas market has started to open up. Several films from Taiwan have not only won awards at major movie festivals, but have also attracted record audiences at mainstream cinemas in the United States, Europe, and several Asian countries. Lee Ang’s ( 李安 ) The Wedding Banquet, for example, which won the 1993 Golden Bear Award for best film in Berlin, grossed US$6 million in the United States. And his Eat Drink Man Woman brought in more than US$7 million in U.S. ticket sales. Hsu believes that at least part of the reason for the change is simply that Chinese films—whether from Taiwan or Mainland China—are the latest fad in the movie world. “It seems like there’s a China fever in the global film industry,” he says. “Foreign companies are showing more interest in Chinese movies.”
At the heart of this fad, however, is a change in Taiwan movies themselves. Directors are beginning to become interested in themes that have a broader appeal than in the past. The Wedding Banquet, for example, examines traditional-versus-modern attitudes toward homosexuality. In the story, an old-fashioned Chinese couple eventually accept their gay son—but only after he has tried to please them by staging a marriage of convenience with a woman friend. Because the story takes place in New York, and the son’s male lover is American, it also confronts some of the problems that arise when two cultures collide. Tsai Ming-liang’s ( 蔡明亮 ) Vive l’amour also deals with a widely accessible theme—urban alienation. It uses the lives of a woman and two men in Taipei to reflect feelings of despair and loneliness among young adults living in a materialistic, impersonal society. “The backgrounds are Chinese, but the themes are universal,” Hsu says of these films. “Foreign audiences can appreciate the movies because they also have these things in their society.”
The movies that have done best in international markets have also tended to package serious themes in lighthearted settings. The Wedding Banquet comes across as a light comedy. It is also made more appealing by introducing audiences to the colorful Chinese wedding banquet tradition. And Lee Ang’s Eat Drink Man Woman, which deals with three sisters and their relationship with their widowed father, also gives a comic twist to the universal problem of generational differences. But adding significantly to the movie’s popular appeal is the appearance of many exquisite Chinese dishes as they are prepared by the father, who is a famous chef.
Creative promotional gimmicks have also helped to cultivate overseas markets. For example, at the premiere of Eat Drink Man Woman in Cannes, the Central Motion Picture Corp. invited reporters, critics, and film company executives to a huge Chinese-style banquet. People could actually taste the dishes that they saw in the movie. When The Wedding Banquet was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, the producer threw a big party in which all the decorations, including the invitations, were based on traditional Chinese wedding items. And Vive l’amour attracted media attention by inviting several internationally known director to the film’s showing in Venice.
But getting film distributors interested in a movie is just one step in successfully developing overseas markets. One of the biggest difficulties Taiwan faces, says Hsu Li-kong, is a lack of professionals who are familiar with the laws regarding film distribution rights in different countries. “We have to sign a forty-page contract when we sell a movie,” Hsu says. “We have no objection to all the details, but without the advice of specialists, it can be a little risky.”
While universal themes and good promotional packages have worked well in getting some Taiwan films into American and European cinemas, Asian markets are proving more difficult to crack. “The biggest overseas market for Taiwan films should be the areas where Chinese people live,” Hsu says. But generally speaking, audiences in Asian countries, including Taiwan, are more interested in Hollywood-style films or in the action-packed kungfu stories that come out of Hong Kong. They still classify Taiwan movies with the numerous low-quality commercial productions that were standard fare from the island during the 1960s and 1970s.
One approach that producers have taken in Asian markets is simply to spark the curiosity of moviegoers. They will try to show a Taiwan film, for example, at a theater that generally plays only Western movies or at those that charge the highest ticket prices. In this way, they hope that audiences will wonder: What’s so special about this Taiwan movie that it’s being shown here? Or what’s so good about this film that it’s more expensive than others? Hsu says that by using this approach—and by backing it up with good-quality movies—Taiwan films have already won back some audiences in Hong Kong and Singapore. “When our reputation is established in a market, the rest is easier,” he says.
Whether the market is in America, Europe, Asia, or right in Taiwan, the real selling point is the film itself. “All the packaging and promotional activities are just ways of getting people’s attention,” Hsu says. “A movie’s marketability ultimately depends on whether its theme can create a mental resonance with audiences—Chinese or foreign.”
—by Jim Hwang