On January 30 this year, New Year’s Eve by the lunar calendar, the domestically made time travel comedy Twa-tiu-tiann was released in theaters around Taiwan. By February 6, the movie had raked in NT$100 million ($3.3 million) nationwide, narrowly defeating the Hollywood action thriller Robocop to take over the No. 1 spot in local ticket sales. Twa-tiu-tiann went on to earn more than NT$200 million (US$6.6 million) in Taiwan.
The movie’s release date was scheduled to coincide with the Lunar New Year holiday, a time when the fortunate receive gifts of cash and have more free time—this year’s vacation was six days long—for leisure pursuits like seeing movies. This is why the Hollywood imports I, Frankenstein, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Robocop were all released on January 30 this year.
Twa-tiu-tiann is the Taiwanese-language name for an area that was one of the earliest parts of the Taipei basin to be settled and is now found within Taipei City’s Datong District. In the movie, actor and former talk show host Chris Wang (王宥勝) stars in the lead role as Jack, a present-day university student. As the film opens, Jack takes notice of a particular painting while visiting an art gallery in Datong District. The artwork depicts a busy street lined with shops, and after taking a photograph of it, Jack suddenly finds himself transported back to the 1920s, when the picture was painted. After that, falling in love with an actress is just one of the things that happen to the young man.
Yeh Tien-lun (葉天倫), director of Twa-tiu-tiann and head of Green Film Production Co., chose the setting carefully. “It’s intended to represent an ideal Taiwan,” Yeh says. “At that time, Twa-tiu-tiann had developed into an urban center with a dense mix of artistic, commercial and cultural activities.” Local resistance against Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) was also on the rise, with the Taiwanese population petitioning the Japanese for greater self-governance, among other things. Opposition leaders of the time included Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水, 1891–1931), a medical doctor, played by actor Lee Li-jen (李李仁) in the movie, who becomes a source of great inspiration for Jack. Jack undergoes a rite of passage that sees him move from idle ignorance to awareness of local history and identity. Near the end of the film, he helps Chiang escape from prison.
Twa-tiu-tiann’s box-office triumph marked the fifth consecutive year in which a local production had become Taiwan’s highest-grossing Lunar New Year film. The movie’s success followed those of 2010’s Monga, 2011’s Night Market Hero, 2012’s Din Tao: Leader of the Parade and 2013’s David Loman, each of which had ticket sales ranging between NT$100 million (US$3.3 million) and NT$400 million (US$13.3 million).
Street vendors prepare food in Night Market Hero, a Lunar New Year hit from 2011. (Photo courtesy of Green Film Production Co.)
Characters in Twa-tiu-tiann and these other recent holiday hits perform much of the dialogue in Taiwanese, the language of the Holo people, the largest ethnic group in Taiwan, while the subject matter centers on the grassroots culture of the present and relatively recent past. For example, Din Tao and Lion Dancing, another Lunar New Year smash released this year, feature troupes of performers who frequently speak Taiwanese as they compete to attract believers and onlookers during temple festival parades.
Ryan Cheng (鄭秉泓) is a film critic and lecturer at several universities in central and southern Taiwan who also helps organize the annual New Taipei City Film Festival and Kaohsiung Film Festival in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan. Cheng says the distinct local style of recent Lunar New Year films has helped revive the long-neglected genre of “proletarian movies” in Taiwan. “Every country should have its own proletarian drama aimed at entertaining domestic viewers,” he says. “The downside is that these dramas may not prove so appealing to foreign audiences, but that’s a risk worth taking.”
Yeh believes that Lunar New Year movies should convey a specific emotion. “It’s not necessarily a funny or happy feeling,” Yeh says. “It’s more of a positive energy, an encouraging prospect of better days to come.”
The director also insists that his Lunar New Year films appeal to family members of all ages. Yeh knows the genre well, as his credits include Night Market Hero, which focuses on the lives of food and beverage street vendors. “During the New Year holiday, people get together and have fun with their relatives by doing things like going to amusement parks and movie theaters,” Yeh says. “For these audiences, I try to arrange something like a buffet, which Taiwanese people like a lot. The idea is to simultaneously serve a variety of ‘dishes’ like a big cast, rich visuals and dramatic elements that arouse both laughter and tears.”
Cheng points out that in both Twa-tiu-tiann and Night Market Hero, Yeh employs key elements of local culture—traditional glove puppetry, for example—to evoke a shared past. Cheng traces this cinematic trend back to the 2008 smash Cape No.7, a decidedly proletarian story about a band formed to provide an opening act for a concert in Pingtung County, southern Taiwan. Among the cultural symbols featured in Cape No.7 are aboriginal necklaces that represent courage or friendship as well as memories of Japanese rule.
Body puppets of a folk god are a key element of local culture featured in Night Market Hero. (Photo courtesy of Green Film Production Co.)
With around NT$530 million (US$16.8 million) in nationwide ticket sales, Cape No.7 remains Taiwan’s top-grossing locally made movie to date. Its box-office success has been topped only by a handful of Hollywood blockbusters including Avatar (2009), which earned NT$1.1 billion (US$33.3 million) in Taiwan, and Titanic (1997), which took in NT$760 million (US$26.5 million).
While Cape No.7 was not released during the Lunar New Year holiday season, its landmark success marked a revival of public interest in locally made films, which domestic audiences had largely ignored since the mid-1980s. In the following two decades, Taiwan’s film industry released only around 10 works each year, while imported movies would often account for more than 98 percent of all box office receipts during that time. Cape No.7’s success, however, indicated that domestic audiences still have a desire for local narratives. Taiwan’s filmmakers have taken notice, as 2013 saw the nation’s film industry release 51 works and the market share of imported movies fall to 86 percent of box office receipts.
Cape No.7 may have established a new standard for movies made in Taiwan, Cheng says, but its localized, proletarian theme and style were not new. The critic views the film as having built upon elements of previous commercially successful Lunar New Year movies such as Cute Girls (1980) and Cheerful Wind (1981), which were directed by legendary filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢).
Hou later turned from melodramatic entertainment to the more introspective, thoughtful style that characterized Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema movement, which began in the early 1980s and lasted for around a decade. New Wave films such as Hou’s City of Sadness (1989) had a quieter, art-house style that won international acclaim but failed to reinvigorate the nation’s declining film industry. “The artistic quality of movies kept growing,” Cheng says of the New Wave era, “but the audience didn’t.”
Despite the elitist propensity and commercial failure of most New Wave films, their use of language is echoed in recent Lunar New Year films. Cheng notes that many New Wave films were based on novels of the late 1970s that featured dialogues in Mandarin, Taiwanese and other native languages. That mix can be viewed as a reaction to earlier mainstream films in which even residents of rural communities are seen speaking fluent standard Mandarin, as the government heavily promoted the use of the language in the 1960s and 1970s.
A scene from Lion Dancing, another popular Lunar New Year film released this year (Photo courtesy of Good Kids Entertainment)
Multilingual Society
Today, in the wake of the government’s promotion of Mandarin and the reaction against it, modern movies include dialogue in Hakka, another major dialect, indigenous tongues and Taiwanese simply because the mix accurately reflects Taiwan’s multiethnic, multilingual society. “Outside Taipei, people speak a lot of Taiwanese,” says Yeh, for whom the language is a mother tongue. “Characters in a movie are expected to speak a certain language in a specific time and place.”
Setting the majority of Twa-tiu-tiann in the 1920s, a quarter-century after the arrival of the Japanese, also required that some dialogue be conducted in Japanese, as the language was then widely spoken in Taiwan and its use was mandatory in public schools.
Local and central governments have played a significant role in the revival of Lunar New Year movies. For example, the earlier holiday hit Monga, a 1980s gangster story set in Taipei’s Monga area (today’s Wanhua District), received substantial support from the Taipei City Government, which offered grants, helped with street closings during filming and launched marketing campaigns at home and abroad. Twa-tiu-tiann received considerable financial assistance from the Ministry of Culture (MOC), which subsidized part of the film’s production cost of around NT$200 million (US$6.7 million). The ministry also helped Green Film secure private investment, a new approach in the central government’s long-running effort to assist filmmakers.
The MOC’s assistance for Twa-tiu-tiann extended to providing settings, as the movie’s major street scenes were shot at the ministry’s National Center for Traditional Arts. The complex was established in 2002 in Yilan County, northeastern Taiwan to promote traditional Taiwanese arts such as music and theater. More of interest to Yeh, the center contains a boulevard devoted to folk art that is lined with early 20th century-style townhouses. The director’s team was permitted to refurbish the boulevard’s homes to capture the atmosphere of the Japanese era.
In February and early March this year, Yeh made an islandwide tour to attend screenings of Twa-tiu-tiann at local theaters. The experience alerted him to a trend that has seen smaller community theaters disappear as younger viewers flock to cinema multiplexes like those found in shopping malls. To arrest that decline, he suggests that the government provide subsidies to smaller theaters for screening domestically made films. “That way domestic films would be sure to reach local audiences,” he says. “Of course, we local filmmakers would have to produce more movies to make such a system effective.”
Meanwhile, the ticket sales of such films as Twa-tiu-tiann indicate that Taiwan’s movie industry has developed a formula for Lunar New Year box-office success. The next challenge will be consistently replicating that success during other seasons, as was the case with Cape No.7. Yeh’s proposal to bring more locally made films before an expanded viewership base at community theaters might be just the ticket for spreading that holiday cheer throughout the year.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw