Director’s Picks: Ten Taiwanese American Films to Watch

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  What is Taiwanese American cinema? Films directed by Taiwanese Americans? Films about the relationship between nation and diaspora? Films that explore the specific experiences of American-born Taiwanese? Films that distinguish themselves culturally or politically from the more recognizable “Asian American” or “Chinese American” film? There’s not enough of a critical mass of films to answer that question with any meaningful conviction. But perhaps this ambiguity is what has…

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Director’s Picks: Ten Films from Taiwan to Watch

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By guest contributor Brian Hu, a film curator and educator with a focus on Asian and Asian American cinema. Where does one start with Taiwan cinema? While it was barely scraping by with a couple dozen features per year in the early 2000s, the Taiwanese film industry had once been one of the world’s biggest, churning out a combination of local Taiwanese-language productions, big propaganda epics, and Hong Kong co-productions. This is a formidable history, one that has chronicled Taiwanese…

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Why I Love “Everything Everywhere All At Once”

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  From the point of view of a Taiwanese American eighteen year old aspiring filmmaker I’ve been following “Everything Everywhere All At Once” since the first trailer released over a year ago. The trailer told me nothing about the plot of the movie, but as soon as I saw it, I knew it would be the most epic movie I had ever seen. There was a combination of factors that intrigued me: the sci-fi/Asian American immigrant mother-daughter hybrid story, the mysteriousness of the trailer,…

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“Danny, Danny”: Meet San Francisco filmmaker Huan Cheng

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FEATURE PHOTOS COURTESY OF HUAN CHENG, 2021 San Francisco-based filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Huan Cheng explores the loneliness of the immigrant experience in her short film Danny, Danny. Cheng, born in Taiwan, draws upon her own experiences of arriving in the United States as a young adult in Danny, Danny, which screened at CAAMFest this year and The Method Fest in 2020, and is now available to audiences again. Cheng is a member of the Hollywood Professional Association 2021 Young Entertainment…

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From CAAMFest 2021 and Taiwan Academy: “Direct to Taiwan”

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TaiwaneseAmerican.org is pleased to support the premier Asian American Film Festival in the San Francisco/Bay Area. CAAM Fest, the Center for Asian American Media’s annual festival features amazing works in film, TV, and digital media. This year, their events and screenings are scheduled May 13-23 and available to most audiences in a virtual format to honor Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. With new support from Taiwan Academy, CAAMFest 2021 is proud to showcase "Direct to Taiwan,"…

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What to Watch: Taiwanese Shows & Movies on Netflix Now

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From the ICONIC 2005 Taiwanese series 王子變青蛙 (The Prince Who Turns into a Frog) with its ambitious fulfillment of all classical elements (two exceptionally hot guys, collision-based amnesia) to the highest-grossing LGBTQ+ film in Taiwanese history, Your Name Engraved Herein, we can't wait to watch our way through Netflix's lineup of Taiwanese shows and movies. TV SHOWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MppKF564QEk Triad Princess 極道千金 (Netflix Original Series)  Language:…

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New on Netflix: A Taiwanese Tale of Two Cities

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An Interview with “A Taiwanese Tale of Two Cities” actor Denny Huang When Denny Huang decided to move to Taipei in 2005 as a young adult, he had no idea what he was going to do. As a Taiwanese American born in Houston, he barely spoke Mandarin at the time, and when he started pursuing acting roles, he realized his American-accent would be an issue. To manage, as he was slowly building his film & TV career (with roles in TV dramas like “Bull Fighting” and “Across the Ocean to…

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