When the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan announced that it had chosen director Midi Z’s Ice Poison (2014) to compete for Best International Feature Film at the 2014 Academy Awards, the director said he was stunned by the decision. This was not just a matter of showing humbleness: Midi Z admitted he was surprised because the film does not appear to be a quintessential representation of Taiwanese society. Ice Poison mostly centres on a couple trying to survive in the ghettoised parts of Myanmar and the experience of drug dealing and addiction. The total production budget was under NT$10 million (approximately US$30,000), and the storytelling is far from entertaining. Its slow pace is configured by extensive long takes, occasional shaky hand-held cameras, and an absence of major movie stars.

Midi Z declared the film’s official recognition to be a sign that Taiwan ‘respects diversity and sees possibility in the film’ (Zhao 2015), but not everyone on the Taiwanese film scene agreed with the decision. Some critics thought a lack of word-of-mouth marketing would hurt the film’s chances at an Oscar. Other industry professionals pointed to the other strong contenders in the selection pool, including Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (2013) and the well-liked, top-grossing, baseball-themed Kano (2014, dir. Umin Boya), and wondered why these films lost out to Ice Poison. There were a few raised eyebrows at the opaque selection process and demands that the government release a list of the names on the juror committee (Xu 2014). Implicit in all these critiques is an underlying bias against a non-mainstream film by an immigrant director, particularly one from Southeast Asia. They also underscore the industry’s narrow-mindedness: its inability to fathom a film’s potential when it is not a genre piece set in contemporary Taiwanese society.

Midi Z (Zhao Deyin) was born in Lashio in northern Burma/Myanmar and is of Chinese descent. Employing a guerrilla style of digital filmmaking and relying in part on the Taiwanese government’s fudaojin subsidy policy, he makes films that deal with the harsh economic and social circumstances in his home country of Myanmar and with issues relating to neighbouring territories, such as Laos and Thailand.