Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema

Did you know regular filmmaking on Taiwan only started in the 1950s? With a Taiwanese-language film industry, which had its first feature length hit with the local opera film Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan in 1956? 1,000-plus Taiwanese-language features were made up to the 1970s. But the budgets were miniscule, the companies short-lived, and there was no archive. They were quickly forgotten, and only 200-plus survive. Now, Taiwan’s lost commercial cinema is being recovered and restored by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) and the Tainan National University of Arts (TNNUA).

To mark the 70^th anniversary of Taiwanese-language cinema and acknowledge its roots in local opera, our 2026 edition focuses on the music of Taiwanese-language cinema. We have a symposium at SOAS University of London on 12 June 2026, with ethnomusicologist Professors Nancy Guy and Nanfang Liu, as well as TNNUA restoration expert Dr. Tseng Chi-Hsien. Our screening tour includes London Garden Cinema and Cardiff University screenings of the TNNUA restoration of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan with English subtitles specially prepared for this occasion. In Leicester and Sheffield, as well as during the SOAS symposium, we also screen another megahit early opera film, The Wandering of Three Siblings (1962), restored by the TFAI.