Taiwan Gets First Non-European Focus at Lyon's Lumière Market

By Daniel Okafor

Taiwan becomes the first non-European country to receive a dedicated national focus at the International Classic Film Market (MIFC), the industry arm of Lyon's Lumière Festival, according to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). The program, titled Taiwan in Focus, runs alongside this year's guest country, Greece.

Leading the slate is a new 4K restoration of Chen Kun-hou's "Osmanthus Alley," which made its world premiere at the festival on Oct. 12 with Chen and star Lu Hsiao-fen in attendance. TFAI is using the showcase to seek international distribution and programming partners for the island's restored classics. Distributors it has previously worked with have expressed interest, the institute says, with release terms and timing still under negotiation.

Why the soundtrack matters

The restoration brings back the film's original Taiwanese-language audio. That is not a technical footnote. Chen insisted on shooting in Taiwanese, but the state-run Central Motion Picture Corporation released the film in Mandarin, in line with government language policy at the time. Chen eventually persuaded the studio to produce a Taiwanese version, which played in only a limited number of theaters and gradually faded from view.

Adapted from Hsiao Li-hung's novel, the film follows Thik-hông (Lu), an orphan who marries into a wealthy family, is widowed young and watches her son sent away to Japan. Lu won best actress at the 1987 Asia Pacific Film Festival, and the theme song, with lyrics by Wu Nien-jen, took the Golden Horse for best original film song.

The timing is deliberate. The selection coincides with the 70th anniversary of Taiwanese-language cinema, which TFAI traces to 1956's "Xue Pinggui yu Wang Baochuan." Roughly 1,200 Taiwanese-language films were made between the 1960s and 1981; only about 200 survive in TFAI's collection. That survival rate gives the restoration program its urgency.

How do you restore a film without scrubbing it clean?

TFAI restored "Osmanthus Alley" from its original 35mm negative, filling missing frames from an interpositive (a printing element used to duplicate the negative), with audio drawn from the 35mm Taiwanese sound negative. Mold spots and dense clusters of white specks required careful treatment — aggressive cleaning risked erasing image detail, so technicians used masks, adjusted processing settings and finished with frame-by-frame manual repairs.

In line with FIAF's code of ethics, Chen was consulted repeatedly. An intermediate version had more saturated colors, but discussions with the director produced a more subdued final grade, closer to the original photography.

Sound has its own provenance. Tu Duu-chih, who handled the original mix, returned to restore the Taiwanese soundtrack from six primary audio reels. The history embedded there is tidy irony: co-star Lin Hsiu-ling dubbed Lu's dialogue, and Hou Hsiao-hsien — with whom Chen traded cinematography and directing credits from 1979 — voiced Tuo Tsung-hua's role.

What else is on the slate?

At MIFC's Re>birth program on Oct. 15, TFAI will pitch its ongoing restoration of Yao Feng-pan's "All in the Dim Cold Night" (1974), seeking distributors and festival slots. Yao, often called Taiwan's "King of Horror," built the film's atmosphere without modern effects, using low-angle green lighting and burning straw on location.

Taiwan in Focus also includes:

• A round table with TFAI chair Arthur Chu and programmer Howard Yang
• A networking event
• An exhibition of original Taiwanese film posters

The institute holds about 20,000 titles, restores 10 to 12 films a year and has completed more than 100 since 2013. Full restoration, it says, depends on whether a film has "a clear purpose and an audience ready to experience it right now."

"We want audiences to discover Taiwan cinema beyond Taiwan New Cinema and see the many different facets of Taiwan," TFAI said.

For "Osmanthus Alley," the next step is securing overseas releases. TFAI hopes the Lyon showcase builds longer-term partnerships with international archives, giving restored Taiwanese films a life beyond their festival premieres.