Voices of a city
Heard on radios and bars
Leading the new path.
Even orphans need a family.

This super rare 35mm screening was introduced by Duke Professor and author of Taiwanese Cinema Hong Guo-Juin, who provided a lot of great notes I’ll repeat here. Taiwanese cinema before 1982 (aka its pre-history period in relation to world cinema) basically existed in a cultural mode of “healthy realism,” which is a form of melodrama that could also promote state values and institutions. Thus, you got a lot of the same sort of stuff that you got in terms of Soviet filmmaking in the 1940s (“Boy Meets Tractor”) mixed in with not particularly ambitious filmmaking. Director Lee Hsing began in theater and…

Voices of a city
Heard on radios and bars
Leading the new path.
Even orphans need a family.

This super rare 35mm screening was introduced by Duke Professor and author of Taiwanese Cinema Hong Guo-Juin, who provided a lot of great notes I’ll repeat here. Taiwanese cinema before 1982 (aka its pre-history period in relation to world cinema) basically existed in a cultural mode of “healthy realism,” which is a form of melodrama that could also promote state values and institutions. Thus, you got a lot of the same sort of stuff that you got in terms of Soviet filmmaking in the 1940s (“Boy Meets Tractor”) mixed in with not particularly ambitious filmmaking. Director Lee Hsing began in theater and…