By Isabella Tianzi Cai
Jia Zhangke
The 47th Taipei Golden Horse Festival conducted a survey to find out the 100 greatest Chinese-language films made between 1922 and 2009. The votes from 122 film professionals have been tallied and are posted on Film Business Asia’s website.
Director Jia Zhangke has three films in the top 100. They are Xiao Wu (1997), ranked 35th; Still Life (2006), ranked 44th; and Platform (2000), ranked 73rd. Jia’s film Dong, a companion piece to Still Life, is distributed by dGenerate.
As pointed out by Stephen Cremin in the report, majority of the participants of the survey come from Taiwan, and an official list of films was used for the survey, therefore, the results are likely favored toward Taiwanese productions. Six of the top ten are Taiwanese productions, and five of them are directed by either Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien, the leading talents of the Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Hopefully future polls of this kind will recognize the lasting achievements of the Chinese independent film movement of the past decade.
The full list can be viewed at Film Business Asia.