丈夫的秘密
Drama
Minnan, English and Czech subtitles
Director: Lin Tuan-qiu
Starring: Chang Mei-yao, Chan Pan-yang
Distributor: Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute

In this classic melodrama of conflicting duties and desire, a wife comes home to tell her husband she has run into an old friend, now in need of help. When she moves her into their home with her little boy, the husband is overwhelmed with guilt – the wife’s friend is his former lover, and he fears the son is his. Flashbacks within flashbacks and frames with frames signal the twists and turns of a plot adapted from a Japanese novel and transposed to Taiwan to reveal Lin Tuanqiu’s perhaps surprising theme of female solidarity as the solution to life’s crises. Read more

三八新娘憨子婿
Comedy, Romance
Taiwanese, English and Czech subtitles
Director: Hsin Chi
Starring: Chin Mei, Shi Jung, Chin Tu
Distributor: Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute

Bun-tik is a handsome but not too bright young man who is chased by all the girls in the neighbourhood. His father closely guards his chastity, but he sneaks off with his girlfriend, Kui-ki, who is determined that they should get married. However, they run into new opposition when Bun-tik’s father meets Kui-ki’s mother and they discover they were lovers 30 years before. Xin Qi’s lively gender-reversal comedy stands with the younger generation. A swinging sixties farce, it pokes fun at the Confucian moral conventions that were the bedrock of melodramatic angst just a few years earlier. Read more