Taiwan Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji, the husband and wife, Japanese-Chinese directing duo behind “Stonewalling” and “Egg and Stone” have secured multi-national backing for their upcoming fourth film project “A Woman Builds.” The film will depict a Chinese woman forced to live apart from her Japanese husband and their daughter during the pandemic and learning to enjoy the newfound freedom of a pseudo single life. She finds a unique massage parlor to satisfy her sexual needs and decides to build a house back in her home village, despite her husband’s disapproval.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The 2023 Golden Horse Film Project Promotion, the project market that accompanies the Golden Horse film festival and awards in Taiwan in November, has laid out a huge 64-title selection for its 2023 edition. These include 39 film projects at various stages of development and financing; a further seven works in progress; and the 18-previously announced series at project stage.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Neo Sora’s concert documentary “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus,” a standout at the Venice Film Festival, has sold for theatrical distribution in North America to Janus Films ahead of its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The theatrical release will be followed by a Blu-ray Disc release on the “Janus Contemporaries” label. This is the latest deal inked by London and Paris-based production, finance and sales outfit Film Constellation, following a slew of sales to Spain (Filmin), Portugal (Midas Filmes), Germany and Austria (Rapid Eye), Scandinavia (NjutaFilms), Baltics (Kino Pavasaris), South Korea (Media Castle), China (JL Vision Films), Hong Kong and Macau (Edko Films), Taiwan (Cai Chang) and Singapore (Anticipate Pictures).

J. Kim Murphy Mankind is barreling further into an age of climate disaster, but whether it has the speaking vocabulary, much less a cinematic one, to accurately interpret its rapidly changing environment is another matter. With his astonishing new experimental feature, “The Human Surge 3,” Argentine filmmaker Eduardo Williams proposes a new analogue for the sensation of modern living: It’s kind of like seeing panoramas shot with a 360-degree camera, navigated via a VR headset and then translated back to a traditional cinematic frame, completely and utterly distorting the imagery in the process.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Director Clara Law (“The Goddess of 1967”) has been set as president of the jury which will discern this year’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards. She will be joined by Malaysia’s Yeo Yann Yann (“Ilo Ilo,” “Wet Season,” American Born Chinese”), German producer Anna Katchko (“Stepne,” “Happiness”), and Faisal Baltyuor, producer and CEO of Muvi Studios in Saudi Arabia. A separate jury for documentaries and animation will be headed by Taiwan-based Myanmar director Midi Z, India’s Rima Das and Japanese documentary maker Toda Hikaru. The APSAs will be presented at a ceremony in Gold Coast, Queensland on Nov.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including “Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring,” has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film “An Autumn Afternoon” – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute. But it falls to October’s Tokyo International Film Festival to put on this year’s biggest and most comprehensive reconstruction of Ozu’s surprisingly varied career. Working in conjunction with the National Film Archive of Japan, the festival will present an extensive retrospective that covers almost all the films that Ozu directed (TIFF/NFAJ Classics: Ozu Yasujiro Week) from Oct. 24-29. Ozu spent his entire career, from camera assistant in 1923 to renown director in 1962, as an employee of major Japanese studio Shochiku, with all the advantages and disadvantages such an arrangement brought. While Ozu is best known for his stripped-down dramas, often centered on family relationships, sometimes troubled or contentious, involving parents and young or grown-up children, many hinging on questions of marriage, generational misunderstandings or the loneliness of the elderly, the director’s register may not entirely have been of his own choosing. “The apparent consistency of the post-war films surely owes as much to this production situation as to Ozu’s aesthetic choices,” wrote critic Tony Rayns in a recent Sight & Sound portrait.

Rowoon for Netflix’s latest K-drama, A Time Called You.A Time Called You, a remake of the 2019 Taiwanese series Someday or One Day, stars Ahn Hyo-seop (A Business Proposal) as lead male character Koo Yeon-jun. Meanwhile, Rowoon made a special appearance as Tae-ha, a friend of Yeon-jun’s.In a new interview with SBS Star, the actor spoke about how he had “always wanted to work together” with Rowoon and “recommended” the former SF9 member when production was looking for a special guest actor.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Four years ago, before COVID turned everything upside-down, a new Asian masterpiece world premiered virtually unnoticed at the Toronto Film Festival. I’m referring to “A Sun,” a multi-faceted Taiwanese family saga from director Chung Mong-Hong that seemed to shift and evolve as it unfolded, challenging what audiences though they knew about the characters.

EXCLUSIVE: France TV Distribution has unveiled a raft of deals on Andréa Bescond and Éric Métayer’s intergenerational comedy-drama Big Kids.

A Time Called You director Kim Jin-won has spoken about the changes of the new Netflix K-drama, as compared to its source material, the 2019 Taiwanese series Someday or One Day.In a new interview with The Korea Times, Kim opened up about how it felt like working on A Time Called You, which is a remake of the popular 2019 Taiwanese series, Someday or One Day.The director shared that because he is a “big fan” of the original series, a huge “difficulty” when it came to A Time Called You was “finding the balance between staying true to the original and carving out new identity”.“If it’s too similar, there comes a question on our series’ identity and on why we are making this series,” he said, later noting that he and screenwriter Choi Hyo-bi “didn’t deliberately try to make huge changes”.“As we go with the flow, we know it will have certain aspects of the characters that will naturally deviate,” Kim added. “There have been a lot of changes to the characters, rather than in the overall story.”Kim singled out changes to the character of Nam Si-heon, played by Ahn Hyo-seop of A Business Proposal fame, as the one that really affected the “overall tone of the series”.“I believed that creating Si-heon as more adult and mature would help to develop the story more smoothly,” the A Time Called You director added.

A Time Called You star Jeon Yeo-been says the memorable moment while filming the new Netflix K-drama was the kissing scene.Jeon Yeo-been recently spoke to South Korean media about her time working on A Time Called You, during which she recalled the memorable moment from the K-drama’s production.The actress said that the “first one that springs to mind” was when she and co-star Ahn Hyo-seop were filming a kissing scene on Jeju Island, which lies in the south of the Korean Peninsula.“We encountered lots of difficulties there, because there were just way too many tourists around,” Jeon recalled, per SBS Star. “When Hyo Seop and I were filming our kissing scene, the tourists screamed and were like, ‘Oh my! Oh my!’.”The actress added that the moment was “pretty distracting” and that she had to “try really hard to concentrate”.

Rowoon, a member of boyband SF9, wasn’t paid “any money” for his role in the new Netflix K-drama A Time Called You.Last week, Netflix released its latest South Korean series, titled A Time Called You. The new K-drama, which stars Ahn Hyo-seop (A Business Proposal) and Jeon Yeo-been (Vincenzo), is a remake of the 2019 Taiwanese series Someday or One Day.The series features a special appearance by Rowoon, who plays the character of Tae-ha, a friend of male protagonist Si-heon (portrayed by Ahn).

A Time Called You, a remake of Taiwanese series Someday or One Day.In a new interview with Yonhap News Agency, Jeon Yeo-been opened up about how it felt to work on A Time Called You as a fan of the original series, Someday or One Day.“I watched the original work years ago and fell in love with it. As I have respect for its creator, I felt pressure,” she said.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Yakusho Koji, the Japanese star who was named best actor at Cannes this year in Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days,” is set as the subject of a seven-title showcase at the upcoming Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan. Among the septet are classic erotic film “Lost Paradise” from 1997, this year’s “Perfect Days” and 1996 film “Shall We Dance,” which was later remade in Hollywood. A former civil servant who first ventured into Taiga drama (long-running TV series broadcast by NHK), then played in several films by Kurosawa Akira, Yakusho became a major 1990s star in Asia as a result of “Shall We Dance?,” in which he portrayed a ball room dancer, and “Lost Paradise.” He also starred in Itami Juzo’s “Tampopo.” Directed by Morita Yoshimitsu, “Lost Paradise” is a tale of a man and a woman whose marriages no longer make them happy, but who rediscover desire in each other’s arms. Fatefully, however, their newfound joy means ever greater transgression of Japan’s strict morality laws. At the time of the release of “Lost Paradise,” the producers deliberately darkened the erotic scenes to make them less explicit and to achieve less restrictive release classifications.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent “On the Go,” a spirited, freewheeling road movie capturing the first lead performance in a movie of ‘Elite’ star Omar Ayuso, has clinched its first major sales, selling to Salzgeber for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and to Cineplex for Taiwan. Paris-based MPM Premium picked up world sales rights to “On the Go” in the run-up to the Locarno Festival where it world premiered in its Filmmakers of the Present section.

WOODZ has announced his 2023 ‘OO-LI And’ world tour.The K-pop musician is set to kick off his ‘OO-LI And’ tour with a two-night concert in Seoul, South Korea on October 28 and 29. WOODZ will then play three shows in Japan in early-November, as well as one concert in Taiwan.At the start of end of November, the singer kick off the US leg of his tour, which will feature six shows over two weeks in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and more.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Kim Jee-woon’s black comedy “Cobweb,” which debuted this year at Cannes, is set for a U.S. theatrical release in early 2024.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Chinese director Bi Gan, whose 2018 film “Long Day’s Journey into Night” played at Cannes, will next direct “Resurrection.” The ambitious sci-fi detective movie is to be headlined by Chinese superstar Jackson Yee (“Better Days”) and Taiwanese actor Shu Qi (“The Assassin”) who sits on this year’s Venice jury. Boasting Bi’s edgy aesthetic and narrative style, the film tells the story of a woman whose consciousness falls into the “eternal time zone” during a surgical procedure.

Thania Garcia Universal Music Greater China (UMGC) has appointed Timothy Xu as its new chairman and CEO of the Greater China division. He will be responsible for the music company’s operations across mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, effective immediately.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The QCinema International Film Festival in the Philippines has beefed up its industry program by introducing a project market strand, QCinema Project Market (QPM). It acts as a networking and funding platform for Filipino and Southeast Asian projects in advanced development.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Stella. A Life.,” which stars Berlinale best actress award-winner Paula Beer, has been sold to France, Scandinavia and Australia. The film will have a market screening at Toronto Film Festival, and will have its world premiere with a Gala Screening at the Zurich Film Festival.

This year’s Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival will open with a double bill of Snow In Midsummer, directed by Malaysia’s Chong Keat-aun, and Be With Me, from Taiwanese filmmaker Hwarng Wern-ying.

Taiwan’s Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development (BAMID) has announced the submission of Cheng Wei-hao’s Marry My Dead Body for the Best International Feature category of next year’s Oscars. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival has announced dual opening night titles, both inspired by faith and local memories, as well as its closing gala presentation. The festival will open with “Snow in Midsummer,” directed by Chong Keat-aun, a former winner of the Golden Horse Film Awards’ best new director prize with “The Story of Southern Islet,” and “Be With Me,” by Hwarng Wern-ying, who previously won Golden Horse prizes for art direction, costume and makeup. The festival, which runs Nov.

EXCLUSIVE: Karlovy Vary competition pic The Hypnosis, starring Herbert Nordrum (The Worst Person In The World) and Asta August (The Kingdom), has inked a series of international deals for Totem Films. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Lost in Perfection,” the second film by journalist-turned-filmmaker Sung Hsin-yin (“On Happiness Road”), has set Oct. 27 as the date of its commercial release in Sung’s native Taiwan. Ahead of the Taiwan release, the film is expected to have its world premiere at a major festival.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Evil Does Not Exist,” the new film by the Oscar-winning auteur Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, has sold to several additional territories. The film will world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, will have its North America premiere as a special presentation at Toronto, and will go on to screen at New York and San Sebastian. Hamaguchi received Oscar nominations last year for directing and adapted screenplay, shared with Takamasa Ôe, for “Drive My Car.” The film was also nominated in the best picture category and won the international feature film Oscar.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Headlined respectively by “Sound of Metal” lead Riz Ahmed and “Matrix” stars Jessica Henwick and Hugo Weaving, Christos Nikou’s “Fingernails” and Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” figure among seven newly unveiled films which will play in main competition at September’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Also in the running are buzz titles “A Journey in Spring,” from Taiwan’s Peng Tzu-Hui, Wang Ping-Wen, and “Kalak,” directed by Denmark’s Isabella Eklöf.

Aussie filmmaker Kitty Green’s latest pic, The Royal Hotel, starring Julia Garner, and Fingernails, the latest film from Christos Nikou, with Riz Ahmed and Jessie Buckley, have been added to San Sebastian’s competition lineup.

Disney+ has scored the next breakout hit from Asia after “Squid Game.” Star-studded international espionage series “Moving” has become the most watched Korean original on Disney+ globally and Hulu in the U.S., based on hours streamed after seven days. In its first week since launch on Aug. 9, the series also became the most watched series on Disney+ across Asia Pacific, including in Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan – based on hours watched – and the biggest premiere on Disney+ in Korea to date, based on hours streamed in the first week since launch.

Song of the Bandits, starring Kim Nam-gil and Seohyun.Set in the 1920s, the upcoming Song of the Bandits revolves around Koreans who have escaped to the Gando region in China during the Japanese occupation. The series is led by Kim Nam-gil (Through the Darkness) and Girls’ Generation’s Seohyun (Jinxed at First).The new trailer opens with an introduction to the bandits of Gando led by Lee Yoon (played by Kim), a defected Japanese soldier who now steals and kills to protect his countrymen in the region.“Chinese land, Japanese money and Joseon’s people.

Chile on Wednesday named the anti-colonialist Western The Settlers from first-time feature filmmaker Felipe Gálvez as its official entry for Best International Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Refresh for latest…: It’s been another very busy weekend at the international box office with milestones and great holds, as well as a new entry and local-language movies adding to the mix. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Production begins next month on “Black Tide Island,” a historical drama series that presents a Taiwanese insight into the Korean War. Production is headed by Hakka TV and Go Inside. Halla TV is the local Hakka-language linear satellite television channel operated by Taiwan Broadcasting System.

Yeo Siew Hua, the Singaporean director whose “A Land Imagined” won the Locarno Film Festival’s top prize in 2018, has cast acclaimed Taiwanese actors Lee Kang-Sheng (“What Time Is It There?”, “Days”) and Wu Chien-Ho (“A Sun”) in his new “Stranger Eyes.” The film, a thriller with domestic surveillance at its core, is currently shooting. It is set to wrap post-production by early 2024 and start a festival run thereafter. International sales are handled by France’s Playtime.

The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has opened applications to hire a new chair for the British Film Institute (BFI) as Tim Richards’s tenure in the role is set to end next year.