Marco Müller

Born Rome, Italy, 1953. Film critic, producer, film festival curator, expert on Asian cinema.

The most important thing is that it is necessary to produce reflections of reality and truth. Today, 30 years later, each time I see some challenging films, from the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, or Thailand, naturally I think they have seen Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Wang, that they have all seen Taiwan New Cinema.

Pierre Rissient

Pierre Rissient

Born Paris, France, 1936. Veteran film critic, film festival curator; has written frequently on Taiwanese cinema.

Thirty years later, I still feel their freshness. The works that came out of Taiwan in the few years around 1983 were really like a miracle. Perhaps the degree of sophistication is more evident in the films of Edward Yang, but works by Hou Hsiao-hsien also have places that are refined, and are increasingly sophisticated. But that kind of simple purity has always appealed to me, and it is the greatest thing that distinguishes their style from other films.

Martin Rejtman

Martin Rejtman

Born Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961. Author, scriptwriter, director.

For me, Taiwan cinema is the only cinema that can be called a “national” type or an “ethnic” type. It has a contemporaneousness, just like the New Wave in the 1960s, and for me Taiwan films have a kind of intimacy....

Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas

Born 1955. Award-winning French director, maker of a documentary about Hou Hsiao-hsien.

In these films there are no symbols of exoticism; they are entirely and purely in the spirit of modern cinema. If this kind of cinema were to appear in Italy, Spain, or France, I would feel the same level of impact, it’s mind-blowing. So as far as I am concerned, what is really powerful in them is they impressively bring Taiwan into the domain of modern cinema.

Jean-Michel Frodon

Jean-Michel Frodon

Born Paris, France, 1953. Film critic and academic, former film magazine editor and columnist.

It was through motion pictures that I got to know about Taiwan.... The New Cinema inspired dynamic development of films in Taiwan, but afterwards, except for Tsai Ming-liang, no successors to this dynamism have appeared.

Tony Rayns

Tony Rayns

Born 1948. British film critic, film festival curator; has written frequently on Taiwanese cinema.

That was a brilliant, blazing, moment when everything just opened up all at once. Overall, the common point about Taiwan New Cinema is that everyone wanted to do something different from the past, make different kinds of films with different techniques and style, works that would more meet international standards. But at the same time they emphasized a style of Taiwan’s own. They are in the conversation with the best films in the world, drawing worldwide attention to the brilliance of Taiwan cinema.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Born Bangkok, Thailand, 1970. Director, producer, and screenwriter, Golden Palm winner at Cannes (2010).

This reflects everything about cinema, it is fixation, it is death, it is insight into the process of life.

Shozo Ichiyama

Hirokazu Koreeda

Born Tokyo, Japan, 1962. Award-winning director, maker of a documentary about Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang.

These are exactly the kinds of films that I want to make.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Shozo Ichiyama

Veteran Japanese producer; produced many of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films; jury member at numerous major international film festivals.

To be able to have such brilliant cinematic works in that era, the only term I can use to express my feelings is “gasping in amazement” at their perfection.

Wong Kar-wai

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Born Kobe, Japan, 1955. Leading contemporary Japanese director.

These films are of a level of excellence that Japan has not been able to produce. And yet Taiwan came out with so many in such a short period of time. It’s simply incredible.

Ann Hui

Wong Kar-wai

Born Shanghai, mainland China, 1958; moved to Hong Kong in 1963. Internationally renowned director.

Watching A Time to Live and a Time to Die, or That Day on the Beach, you can really feel the dialogue between brain and body. The New Wave in Hong Kong was also starting in those years, and I think that when films get to a certain stage, they are a new language, a new world, a new way of speaking. New people bring new impacts.

Ann Hui

Born Liaoning Province, mainland China, 1947; moved to Hong Kong in 1952. Prominent filmmaker in Hong Kong New Wave. 

It was all extraordinarily serendipitous, extraordinarily free. That’s how these brilliant films got made.