In the shadow of China lie two smaller countries whose fate and fortune in the 1990s will color the geopolitics of the entire Pacific Rim. Hong Kong, with its prospects of reversion to China in 1997, has been much in the news; and Taiwan, with its ending of martial law and budding search for new democracy, is also undergoing dramatic social and political upheavals.
The recent films and the film industry off these two countries reflect both the malaise and the fat-forward drive of overheated economics and changing social relationships.
Given the proximity of countries and cultures, many cinema talents - including directors, cinematographers, and especially actors - work almost interchangeably in Taiwan and Hong Kong. And thanks to the fact that almost all Chinese films are post-dubbed, an actor's native dialect - whether Mandarin, Taiwanese, or Cantonese - doesn't get in the way of the exchange. But the films themselves are not interchangeable: They retain an identifiable national sense and sensibility.
Appropriately enough, last December's Golden Horse International Film Festival in Taipei found two films, one Taiwanese and one from Hong Kong, competing neck to neck for most of the top prizes. In this key Chinese film event, Taiwanese director Hou Hsia-hsien's politically controversial A City of Sadness vied with Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan's sensitively realized drama Full Moon in New York. The two films and their directors represent what is best in cinema in those two countries.
An Astonishing Figure
In 1988 Taiwan's film industry churned out 189 theatrical features. That's an astonishing figure for a country of 20 million, when you consider that the United States, with a population of 250 million, produced only some 450 films in the same period. Hong Kong, with a population of 6 million, turned out an equally impressive number of films that year - about 150. As with many Hong Kong industries, much of the earnings of Hong Kong cinema comes from export.
Of course, producers on both sides of the Taiwan straits bank on distribution beyond their own borders. Their films are routinely dubbed both in Mandarin Chinese and in Cantonese, so they can be distributed to avid film audiences in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Southeast Asian countries where there are sizable Chinese populations, such as in Singapore and Thailand. There's even a market in Japan, where Jackie Chan, the producer-director-star of top grossing cop thrillers, is a favorite among youths.
Some make it to the United States, Canada, and even Europe. Hou Hsia-hsien's tale of wayward youths in neon-lit Taiwan Daughter of the Nile, not only won the unanimous vote of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival in 1988, it also had a commercial run at a London theater.
While Taiwanese films can recoup production costs if they do well domestically, Hong Kong films have to sell abroad just to break even. This fact - plus the mercenary nature of doing business in Hong Kong - makes Hong Kong films highly commercial; successful formulas are cloned over and over again.
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