万有引力 | The Law of Attraction

Four short exposé on love and attraction of the sexes in the big city: a business traveler is delayed due to the malfunction of the airport’s security device, but unexpectedly it sparks off a romance between him and the security officer; a couple’s marriage is in crisis when the repeated attempt to have a child fails; a traffic accident is in reality a trap set by a jealous husband for punishing his unfaithful wife; and a pair of young junkies trying to start anew.

Directed by Tianyu Zhao | Starring : Karen Mok, Jingchu Zhang, Tao Guo, Leon Dai, Zhang Wen | Presented at Montréal Film Festival

第四张画 | The Fourth Portrait

Ten year-old Xiang faces a lonely future after his father dies. Just when he thinks he’s going to spend his life in the orphanage, his estranged mother shows up. And his life changes forever… A loveless mother, a hateful stepfather, a chilly home. Where’s Xiang heading to? He finds comfort in drawing and his work reveals his longing for care and affection. Life is full of hope again when he meets the old school janitor who doesn’t show his kindness easily and a portly man who has crazy ideas and is haunted with nightmares of his brother. A scary truth is about to be unmasked. Will Xiang be able to depict his own image in the fourth portrait?

Directed by Mong-Hong Chung | Starring : Bi Xiao-Hai, Shih-chieh Chin, Lei Hao, Leon Dai, Terri Kwan | Presented at Locarno Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Tokyo Film Festival, Mar del Plata Film Festival, Nantes Film Festival, Cinemanila Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, Gindou Film Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival

停车 | Parking

On Mother’s Day in Taipei, Chen Mo makes a date for dinner with his wife, hoping to bring their estranged relationship back together. While buying a cake on his way home, a car unexpectedly double parks next to his car, preventing his exit. For the entire night, Chen Mo searches the floors of a nearby apartment building for the owner of the illegally parked car, and encounters a succession of strange events and eccentric characters: an old couple living with their precocious granddaughter who have lost their only son, a one-armed barbershop owner cooking fish head soup, a mainland Chinese prostitute trying to escape her pimp’s cruel clutches, and a Hong Kong tailor embroiled in debt and captured by underground loan sharks. After many hardships, Chen Mo finally gets his car out of the parking space, and, with new friends riding beside him, advances toward a new horizon in life.

Directed by Mong-Hong Chung | Starring : Chen Chang, Gwei Lun-Mei, Leon Dai, Chapman To, Jack Kao | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Ghent Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Stockholm Film Festival, Oslo Film Festival, Taipei Film Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival

深海 | Blue Cha Cha

Just coming out of the jail, depressed and close-hearted, Ah Yu met two men with different characters from each other. One is a businessman, charming and mature; the other is a young supervisor in a factory with a promising future. But these two loves are short-lived, fading away like bubbles on the beach. With a wounded soul, she went back to the cottage owned by Sister An, a friend from jail. An treats her like a sister, embracing her tortured soul. When they are unhappy, they dance on the pier. Their dancing steps swing like small boats in the harbor, driving away all the depression. Someday, a puppet show was performed on the pier. They saw a fisherman, Lao-Yao, playing a puppet. Through Lao-Yao who suffers from autism, Ah Yu found herself tangled in a feeling as deep as the ocean.

Directed by Wen-Tang Cheng | Starring : Tarcy Su, Yi-Ching Lu, Leon Dai, Wei Lee, Pong-Fong Wu | Presented at Blue Ribbon Film Festival

鲁宾逊漂流记 | Robinson’s Crusoe

The film follows Robinson, a very succesfull real estate broker, who lives in a modern hotel in Taipei. But all the success also hides a lonely man, whose relations are becoming distant, including friends and lovers; Robinson’s dream is the Crusoe, an island on the Caribbean, which he wants to try purchase.

Directed by Cheng-sheng Lin | Starring : Leon Dai, Shiang-chyi Chen, Angelica Lee, Kuei-Mei Yang, Phoenix Cheng | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Sao Paulo Film Festival, Hawaii Film Festival

双瞳 | Double Vision

Taipei, the teeming capital of Taiwan, is a city in which the high-tech trappings of modern life compete with beliefs that reach back four millennia into Chinese history. It is a place where ghosts are considered as real as skyscrapers, and in which one troubled police officer comes up against an evil so dark that it threatens not only his life, but his very soul. Ace detective Huang Huo-tu is falling apart. As payback for blowing the whistle on corruption in the force, he’s relegated to the do-nothing job of Foreign Affairs Officer. His fellow policemen have turned on him, and his wife, Ching-fang, is filing for divorce. But, then, three grisly murders shake up the department. The victims are unrelated, but the Coroner finds a mysterious black fungus in their brains, along with evidence that they had all died in a hallucinatory state.

Directed by Kuo-fu Chen | Starring : Tony Leung Ka Fai, Rene Liu, Leon Dai, David Morse, Kuei-Mei Yang | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Tokyo Film Festival

爱你爱我 | Betelnut Beauty

In 21st Century Taipei, a restless city where young souls are set adrift, Feng and Fei-fei meet in a sudden summer afternoon thunderstorm. Feng, fresh out of the army, has just made a beeline for Taipei, eager to start a new life. Fei-fei has also recently turned a new page in her young life, having just run away from home. Fei-fei teams up with her friend, Yili, who works at a nightclub. They become “betelnut beauties” hawking their fare from a roadside stall of glass and neon. Betelnut, a legally sold chewing pepper that produces an effect not unlike marijuana, is a favorite among the working class men. Feng and Fei-fei quickly fall in love, two clueless souls clinging desperately to each other as they try to keep up with the punishing rush of city life.

Directed by Cheng-sheng Lin | Starring : Chen Chang, Angelica Lee, Leon Dai, Ming-chun Kao, Chen-Nan Tsai | Presented at Berlin Film Festival, Singapore Film Festival, Jeonju Film Festival, Brisbane Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Flanders Film Festival, Hawaii Film Festival, Helsinki Film Festival

一一 | Yi yi: A One and a Two

With the runaway international acclaim of this film, Taiwanese director Edward Yang could no longer be called Asian cinema’s best-kept secret. Yi Yi swiftly follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-aged father NJ’s tenuous flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, Yang imbues every gorgeous frame with a deft, humane clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.

Directed by Edward Yang | Starring : Nien-Jen Wu, Elaine Jin, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Issei Ogata | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Munich Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival,  Toronto Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, Bergen Film Festival, Valladolid Film Festival, Tokyo Film Festival, London Film Festival, Oslo Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Fribourg Film Festival, Singapore Film Festival, Hong Kong Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Cinemanila Film Festival

小百无禁忌 | Hidden Whisper

The film consists of three stories: One about a 5-year-old girl, one about a teenager, and still another about a 30 something woman involved in an affair with a married man. Without providing a definite answer whether the three leading actresses are playing the same person in different stages of life, the movie instead hovers on several consistent themes that keep on emerging in all the stories. For example, the image of drops of blood on the clothes, in the shape of maroon flowers.

Directed by Vivian Chang | Starring : Qi Shu, Leon Dai, Elaine Jin, Ching-ting Hsia, Shu-shen Hsiao | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Fribourg Film Festival, Febio Film Festival

心动 | Tempting Heart

Modern-day director Cheryl sets out to tell a tale of teen love that fizzled and was then reignited in adulthood. Takeshi Kaneshiro and Gigi Leung Wing-Kei are the on-and-off-again lovers. Their relationship begins in high school in the 1970’s and continues in separate episodes into the 1980’s and ‘90’s. Karen Mok Man-Wai forms the third part of a strangely intersecting love triangle. This romantic drama reveals a tangled web of meaning in the relationship between the three friends and is likely to leave a deep impression upon the viewer The beautiful look of the film can be credited to cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin and the award-winning art director Man Lim-Chung.

Directed by Sylvia Chang | Starring : Takeshi Kaneshiro, Gigi Leung, Karen Mok, Sylvia Chang, Leon Dai | Presented at Toronto Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Warsaw Film Festival

天马茶房 | March of Happiness

1945-1947, Taiwan. A teenage couple were deeply in love despite objections from the girl’s family. Their tragic story is played out in travelling troupes, tea-houses and western-style cafes, with the backdrop of Japanese occupation and the 28 February Incident.

Directed by Cheng-sheng Lin | Starring : Giong Lim, Shu-shen Hsiao, Leon Dai, Shufang Chen, Doze Niu | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival

放浪 | Sweet Degeneration

With a singular voice that distinguishes him from his New Taiwan Cinema contemporaries, Lin Cheng-sheng adds to his brief, but already remarkable, filmography with Sweet Degeneration, his third film in two years. As with A Drifting Life and Murmur of Youth, Lin’s new film delicately unfolds, gradually building to a climax of stunning emotional reverberations. Drawn from a particularly painful episode in the director’s past, Sweet Degeneration delves into the uneasy bonds a brother and sister have with each other and the people around them. Upon his return home from his mandatory military service, Chun-shen steals money from his embittered father and sets out for Taipei with half-hearted hopes of finding a job playing the sax. Instead of pursuing his music career, the perpetually apathetic Chun-shen finds it easier to squander his money on cheap hotel rooms and prostitutes. Meanwhile, back home, his sister Ju-feng, who is going through a painful separation from her husband, pines for her brother. She is determined to bring him back into the family fold, whether he wants to come or not.

Directed by Cheng-sheng Lin | Starring : Kang-sheng Lee, Jing Tseng, Leon Dai, Shiang-chyi Chen, Shih-huang Chen | Presented at Berlin Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival