We watch a pretty healthy mix of documentaries amidst feature films in our cinematic diet but it occurs to me that almost all of them are English language ones. This one is a Taiwanese documentary by first time director Hsieh Chin-lin and its subject is the New Taiwan cinema of the 1980s itself. We’re a long way from watching everything from that era but I think we’ve watched enough that we’re not hopelessly ignorant and can recognize enough of the clips included here to make going through this overview a worthwhile experience.

This documentary consists of a series of interviews of directors, film critics, academics and a few artists about the New Taiwan cinematic movement. There are many personalities involved so each person usually only has enough screen time to speak a few lines. The critics and academics are unknown to me but many of the directors featured here are recurring names in this blog: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, Hirokazu Kore-eda etc. Both Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang briefly appear towards the end. Clips of the films they talk about are shown as accompaniment. These interviews are bookended by some very beautiful establishing shots of the locales where they take place: Chiang Mai, Paris, Tokyo, Rotterdam etc. The director herself is presumably the interviewer but never appears and offers neither narration nor much direction. Each person is allowed to say whatever they want.

Unfortunately as short as each interview is, the interlocutors only have time for the most superficial and mundane of statements. This usually consists of effusive praise, mentions of their favorite films and scenes which are almost always by either Hou Hsiao-Hsien or the deceased Edward Yang, and some talk of how those films have influenced them personally. There are only a handful of instances where they say something that is genuinely surprising or insightful, such as one who notes that these films can be rather boring and require some effort to watch. It’s something of a treat to see the directors of all those films we’ve watched, often for the first time, and of course it’s good to add some titles that we’ve missed to our regular list. But for the most part, the content here is disappointing and some interviewees, such as Ai Weiwei, say such empty platitudes that there’s no value in including them. In a way, this really is just a propaganda film to highlight Taiwanese cultural influence as this project was commissioned and funded by the Taipei City Government.

Still, there is some value in watching this broad overview. For one thing, it makes you realize what an extraordinarily small movement this was and as Hou himself says, it was a short-lived one. It mostly consisted of just a handful of directors who all knew each other and were frequently involved in one another’s work. As one interviewee notes, their films were also never commercially very successful. Yet as this documentary demonstrates, they have influenced directors and artists from all across the world. The wonder of it is really how it existed at all, given Taiwan’s tiny population and how their film industry at the time was completely outmatched by the massive commercial behemoth that was Hong Kong. That they managed to exert an influence all out of proportion to their size and made multiple films that will be forever remembered among the greats in cinematic history is truly remarkable. I think this would truly be a story worthy of a documentary but this one isn’t it.

As it is, Flowers of Taipei makes for a pretty marketing video for Taiwan but it’s not really worth watching in of itself. It tries too hard to impress you by going through this extensive list of who’s who in the world of cinema but only wants them to say something without really caring about what it is that they say.