Screen Grabs: A New Taiwanese Cinema giant comes to the Bay

Colonization leaves scars on a people, as does uncertainty over being able to control their own national future—the latter an emotion Americans may now be feeling for the first time since exiting the British Empire. Taiwan is a particular case, a prosperous developed country that nonetheless has spent much of its history under somebody else’s thumb: The Dutch, Imperial China, Japan, then the internal oppression of martial law. When that last ended after nearly four decades in the late 1980s, it was no coincidence that simultaneously there arose in various art forms a new freedom of expression and sense of questioning identity, no longer fettered by governmentally enforced censorship or propaganda.

Its opening salvos arriving as early as 1982, New Taiwanese Cinema gave birth to filmmakers