Curating Taiwan Cinema in France
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- KLT
About this event
Speaker: Dr Wafa Ghermani
About the Talk
Taiwan films were first screened in France in the 1970s during the Karate film craze. But they were indistinctively mixed with the despised Hong Kong, Korean, Japanese martial art movies.
With the screening of A Touch of Zen in 1975 at Cannes Film Festival, Taiwan eventually emerged as a nation of quality cinema concentrated on the personality of King Hu. Nevertheless, it is not until the beginning of the 1980s, with the travel of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics Charles Tesson and Olivier Assayas to Hong Kong and then Taiwan, that the island took some importance in French cinephilia.
Even nowadays, Taiwan cinema in France is still summed up by Hou Hsiao Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang, and sometimes Ang Lee, the latest evolutions of Taiwan cinema are most often ignored, except for Midi Z who is slowly emerging into the cinephile radar.
In this presentation, I would like to draw an overview of Taiwan film curating in France since the 1990s and of the construction of a cinephile discourse about it. I will then present my own experience of film curator since 2009 and the evolution of Taiwanese film promotion policy from a focus on new directors only to the realisation of the importance of classical movies.
About the Speaker
Wafa Ghermani holds a PhD from the Université Paris 3 – La Sorbonne Nouvelle in film studies. Her PhD focused on Taiwan cinema and National Identity from the Japanese colonial period to nowadays. She currently works at the Cinémathèque française and is a curator for many festivals and Taiwan film related events (Vesoul International Asian Film Festival, Warsaw Five Flavours Film Festival, Rencontres du cinéma taiwanais in Paris...)
Her recent contributions include the forwords of the translation of the script of A City of Sadness into French, « Le cinéma taiwanais : repenser la marginalité comme centralité », « 然的內在風景與性別張力：評潘壘《颱風》 in 電影欣實 Film Appreciation, «Exils: de la nostalgie à la reconquête du passé dans le cinéma ».
Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies
Contact email: lr27@soas.ac.uk