“It is useful to recall the historical context in which the Taiwanese B-movie emerged. The victimization of women is a key theme throughout many of the films, giving rise to a whole genre of shockingly frank rape-revenge films (including THE LADY AVENGER, by YANG Chia-Yun, a pioneering female filmmaker).Ĭo-organized by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) and Taiwan Cinema Toolkit, “Taiwan B-Movies” showcases five representative films from the period, as well as the 2005 documentary TAIWAN BLACK MOVIES, which went a long way towards re-focusing attention on this realm of Taiwanese cinema, and encompasses glimpses of several lost films. They represent an eruption onto the screen of elements of Taiwanese society that had formerly been banished, from organized crime and prostitution to the prison system and governmental corruption. Reflecting the politically and socially tumultuous events of the era, they are suffused with violence and brutality.

That these films are not better known abroad is due in large part to how potent and gleefully disreputable they are. This series shines a spotlight on a realm of Taiwanese cinema that has been largely overlooked abroad: the down-and-dirty genre films that proliferated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and which marked a sharp break from the more staid and respectable Taiwanese cinema that had dominated the country’s screens up to that point.

Chia drama movies