For the longest time, the cinema of Taiwan has been synonymous with Taiwan New Cinema (tai wan xin dian ying), a movement many film critics and scholars recognise as a new direction in filmmaking in the country. From this movement, several world-class directors have emerged, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang, and have produced a series of films that explore social tensions and problems in cinematically compelling ways, blending social realism with modernist innovation. The success story of Taiwan New Cinema is a familiar one – it is often recognised and juxtaposed as part of the global new wave movement in film history. David A. Cook (2016), in A History of Narrative Film, describes these films as ‘low- to medium-budget films that dealt with day-to-day reality in Taiwan but were often stylistically experimental’ (618). In Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s (2010) account, Taiwan cinema appears only to exist or be worthy of attention after 1982, when the New Wave started. By their definitions, these films cultivated an ‘elliptical approach to storytelling, using flashbacks and fantasy sequences, and dedramatized situations’ (652), all reminiscent of European art cinema of the 1960s (namely, films of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave – la nouvelle vague). Apart from sharing the spirit and several aspects of the cinematic form with the French New Wave, this new direction in Taiwanese filmmaking exhibits an evasion of governmental censorship under martial law, on the one hand, and a fresh, modernist exploration of Taiwanese cultural identity not overshadowed by the exiled experience of Chinese mainlanders, on the other hand.

There are many factors behind the canonisation of Taiwan New Cinema on the world stage. One of the most common constituents is that Taiwan cinema is written as part of the Western historiography of global cinema and rarely on its own terms (Hong 2011). Many Euro-American film historians’ treatments of Taiwan cinema assign too much prestige to Taiwan New Cinema, to the point that there is an apparent lack of history before and after the discovery. The brief coverage of Taiwan cinema in Thompson and Bordwell’s Film History, for example, is somewhat ahistorical: the authors jump right into the New Wave by spotlighting two directors, Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and mislabelling the movement as the ‘Taiwanese’ New Wave.