Following last year's success in Lithuania, five classic Taiwanese-language films will be screened once again at Skalvija, one of the oldest cinemas in Lithuania from Nov. 17 to 21 this year, covering genres such as espionage, comedy, social realism, among others, with Lithuanian subtitles.
The films include "The Best Secret Agent (天字第一號, 1964)," "Goodbye, Taipei (再見台北, 1969)," "Dangerous Youth (危險的青春, 1969)," "Brother Liu and Brother Wang on the Roads in Taiwan (王哥柳哥遊台灣, 1959)," and "The Husband Secret (丈夫的秘密, 1960)."
In Lithuania, where the visibility of Asian films is not high, film enthusiasts' perception of Taiwanese films is often limited to "New Wave Cinema" and renowned figures such as Ang Lee (李安), Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), and Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢).
Deimantas Valančiūnas, an associate professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University and a Lithuanian scholar who mainly studies South Asian films had his first face-to-face exchange with film studies professor Chris Berry during the Prague seminar in 2017, which introduced him to Taiwanese-language films.
Deimantas Valančiūnas and Gabija Vosyliute, director of the Asian Art Centre and lecturer at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University, successfully pushed for the screening of Taiwanese-language films at the commercial theater Skalvija in 2020, and received government assistance to screen five Taiwanese-language films such as "The Rice Dumpling Vendors (燒肉粽, 1969)," and "Six Suspects (六個嫌疑犯, 1965)."
Gabija Vosyliute noted that the number of people who watched Taiwanese-language films at the theater had increased in 2020, crediting it to the addition of Lithuanian subtitles, which made it easier for audiences to immerse in them.
Deimantas Valančiūnas and Gabija Vosyliute both mentioned that the pre-recorded introductory videos to each Taiwanese-language film by experts such as Chris Berry, as well as the post-screening Q&A on site or through the internet have been very beneficial for the audiences.
Chris Berry pointed out that the Taiwanese-language films reflect the lives of ordinary people in Taiwan during martial law, offering different perspectives on phenomena such as modernization as opposed to the Healthy Realist films promoted by the state at that time.
This film-screening project in November is supported by Cultural Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the U.K.