TAIWANESE CINEMA

From the Beginning to the New Cinema

※ Cinema arrived on the island of Taiwan in 1901. For the first 20 years, only the Japanese made documentaries and feature films. However, the industry was interrupted in 1937 by the Sino-Japanese War, and virtually nothing was produced until after the Nationalist government took over in 1945. With the end of the civil war in 1949, Shanghai filmmakers sympathetic to the Nationalists accompanied Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, and after the economy stabilized, these exiled filmmakers formed the heart of a new film community in the 1950s.

※ By the 1960s, modernization rapidly...