Review: Taiwan’s Oscar Submission "A Sun"

By: Patrick Gratton

They say that time is the eternal healer. It picks you up from your bootstraps and licks your wounds. Time is also the eternal grim reaper. It has the power to darken one’s heart, hope and inhibitions.  Chung Mong-Hong’s A Sun, the big winner at last year’s Golden Horse Awards and Taiwan's submission for the 93rd Oscars, is a 150+ minute meditational piece on the effects of time and its role in expanding and tightening the human spirit. 

For a film with such a daunting running time, A Sun begins with a bang! Teenager A-Ho (Wu Chien-to) races with fellow gang member on his motorcycle through the pouring rain to a local restaurant. A-Ho thinks this is a simple shakedown to intimidating a rival of theirs. But the gang amputates the rival's hand with a machete (in the film's goriest moment). A-Ho’s father A-Wan (Chien Yi-wen) advocates for a guilty sentence during his son’s trial. When questioned by his wife about why he’s so apathetic towards their son, A-Wan replies that he’s simply giving him a chance to repent while spending time behind bars...

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New International Submissions: Georgia, Luxembourg, and Taiwan

by Nathaniel R

Beginning

We have three more official submissions for Best International Feature Film at the forthcoming Oscars, bringing the number up to nine, and one of them is streaming on Netflix for your pleasure or cathartic misery as the case may be... 

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Golden Horse Nominations for 2019

by Nathaniel R

A lonely student and his teacher become friendly in "Wet Season"

Usually the Golden Horse nominations are a fun and glamorous mix of all the hot movies and movie stars from various Chinese language countries. This year, however, due to political fallout from a speech last year and a Chinese boycott because of increasing tension between the way China sees Taiwan and the way Taiwan sees itself, no films from Mainland China are competing (which takes out a huge chunk of movies and a lot of the most famous movie stars). So the bulk of the features nominated this year are features from Taiwan with a little Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong thrown in. UPDATED WITH THE WINNERS MARKED BY STARS

BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE 

• A Sun (Taiwan) ★
• Suk Suk (Hong Kong)
• The Garden of Evening Mists (Malaysia)
• Wet Season (Singapore)
• Detention (Taiwan)

You may have noticed that Taiwan's current Oscar submission Dear Ex  (streaming on Netflix) is not nominated here. That's because it was a major nominee last year at these same awards. Curiously Singapore's current Oscar submission A Land Imagined (streaming on Netflix) was not nominated in Best Feature at the Golden Horse Awards. It had to settle for a few craft nominations...

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