Of all the restorations completed by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute over the past decade, the work on Tsai Ming-liang’s 1994 Golden Lion winner Vive L’Amour appears to be the least complicated of all. Rescanning the well-preserved original negative in 4K, technicians then set out to remove stains and scratches before the director arrived at the institute to oversee the colour grading and the cleaning up of the soundtrack – a project described by the institute as “moderate” in its scope and difficulty.
For every Vive L’Amour, which bows at the Venice Classics programme on September 3, there’s a The Love in Okinawa. Set in the titular Japanese archipelago and Taiwan, the romance drama about a young, ill-fated couple falling foul of their warring patriarchs was one of the last technicolor Hokkien-language films before mainstream Mandarin-language cinema took over the island’s cinemas in the 1970s. Directed by Lin Fu-ti, the film was considered lost until San Francisco theatre owner Frank Lee called the institute about some reels he discovered in his basement.
“Lee’s family has operated cinemas in Chinatowns across major North American cities,” explained Arthur Chu, chairman of the institute, to The Film Verdict. “Catering to a largely Chinese-speaking audience, they regularly travelled to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s to acquire 35mm prints for theatrical screenings. As digital projection eventually replaced film, hundreds of reels were left stored under the theater’s narrow stage space.
“Among the reels, [our] archivists were astonished to find several important Taiwanese films previously uncatalogued by the institute and presumed lost – including The Love in Okinawa and Sunset Over the Horizon,” the latter being another Japanese-Taiwanese co-production that director Lin Fu-ti shot over the same period in the islands. Ironically, only Lee’s Mandarin-dubbed print of Okinawa survived – and the restored version of the film was screened at the institute in 2023 with the 89-year-old director in attendance.
That screening marked the 10th anniversary of the “Taiwan Classic Film Digital Restoration and Value-Added Utilization Project”, a government-backed initiative aimed at ensuring the preservation of Taiwan’s film heritage “in a long-term and systematic manner”, Chu said. “In the past, the concept of film preservation was rarely prioritized in Taiwan, resulting in many local films becoming lost to time, known only through scattered written records.”
Today, Taiwan is perhaps the most active among its regional counterparts in terms of the preservation, restoration and promotion of a national film heritage in all its forms and sizes. The screenings of the revived Vive L’Amour in Venice was just the latest of the institute’s international presentations of its diverse slate this year. In April, the Far East Film Festival hosted three institute-backed restorations of late 1960s to early 1970s films by the Rome-educated critic-turned-filmmaker Pai Ching-jui; in July, the New York Asian Film Festival hosted Gorgeous, a bawdy social satire financed by wuxia-actor-turned-impresario Hsu Feng and directed by Chang Mei-chun. Last month, the institute unfurled a ten-film programme at Osaka Expo about the history of Taiwanese cinema, with each of the screenings preceded by a teaser trailer of the restoration of Tracing to Expo ’70, a film shot in the last edition of the Osaka event 55 years ago.
“Teruoka Sozo, the programming director of the Osaka Asian Film Festival, first came across Tracing to Expo ’70 in the early 2000s while browsing 16mm prints and VHS tapes of Taiwanese films in Tokyo,” Chu said. “The film’s vivid spectacle and star power left a lasting impression. Decades later, during Filmart in Hong Kong, the film resurfaced in conversation, sparking Sozo’s proposal to TFAI: could this hidden gem be restored in time for Expo 2025’s return to Osaka? A rare print was soon uncovered in the archive, and by mid-year, TFAI had launched a full-scale digital restoration.”
On August 20, the institute’s restoration of the Italy-trained Hsu Chin-liang’s 1979 youth drama The Fellow Who Rejected College premiered in Singapore. Based on a then best-selling novel about a young elite student who gave up the opportunity to attend university because he refused to conform to norms of public examinations, the film was considered the harbinger of the wave of high-school-set films appearing in Taiwan in the 1980s. (The film was co-written by Wu Nien-jin, the author-actor who would later become central to the New Taiwan Cinema movement.)
The president of the Singapore Film Society, Kenneth Tan, mentioned that he had watched The Fellow Who Rejected College as many as 43 times in cinemas when he was a junior high school student in Singapore,” Chu said. “The film deeply resonated with his own experience of the pressures of academic examinations. Moved by this connection, he personally reached out to the director and expressed the hope that TFAI could restore the film.”
Chu considers the restoration initiative goes beyond merely canonisation. “What is being restired is not just the image on film, but the soul and memory of an entire era,” he said, adding that the institute “does not insist on 4K restoration as the sole standard”.
“Decisions must take into account a film’s historical significance, as well as its aesthetic and artistic value, while also assessing its relevance in today’s society and film industry,” he continued.
“More meaningful is that these films carry Taiwan’s history, culture, and everyday experiences. When international audiences watch them, they’re entering a part of Taiwan’s collective memory, seeing our society through the lens of cinema.
“In that sense, restoration is also a form of cultural exchange. The restoration projects are really about reintroducing Taiwanese cinema to the world. It shows that our film history is not limited to just one movement, like the Taiwan New Cinema, but that it spans many decades, full of creativity, diversity, and remarkable stories worth sharing internationally.”
