TAIPEI: For many years, ethnic Chinese filmmakers in the so-called Greater China Circle, which includes such regions as Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and, in the opinion of some, even the Chinese communities in South-East Asia, have been resigned to second-class citizen status in the motion picture industry.
The best thing the more enterprising ones among them could hope for, aside from box-office success, was a somewhat condescending nickname the “Akira Kurosawa” of Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or Macau, or whatever the provenance of the filmmaker in question may be.