“CONSCIOUS WORK”

After several years of absence, Chinese stars began returning to awards ceremonies in Taipei last year, with actress Hu Ling the first to walk the red carpet since the ban.

On Saturday, Geng Jun and some of his actors were among the few Chinese artists to join stars and filmmakers from across the region, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, on the red carpet.

While Geng did not win the Best Director and Best Film awards, his film Bel Ami won the Best Cinematography and Best Editing awards.

Despite political tensions, Golden Horse has remained a stage for independent Chinese films that have no distribution space on the mainland, Taiwanese film critic Wonder Weng told AFP.

“This spirit remains unchanged. I think the Golden Horse Awards have always insisted on being the benchmark” open to all topics, said Weng, a board member of the Taiwan Film Critics Society.

Weng said Lou’s An Unfinished Film, which had previously tackled forbidden topics such as gay sex and the 1989 Tiananmen protests, was “a work of conscience”.

Lou’s latest offering concerns a film crew trying to resume filming a film during the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, as the city was placed in an unprecedented lockdown.

“Lou has inserted banned or blocked images into his work and reminds us that there is a filmmaker willing to preserve historic images for us to see…and let us know there is a different voice,” Weng said.