L’heure d’été 2026 : Taipei

For the 15th anniversary of the L’Heure d’Été festival, Cinéma Galeries once again invites you to escape through the cinema of a city from around the world. In 2026, we travel to Taipei, the city of millions of neon lights, drifting between tradition and modernity!

Taiwan tells a complex story of identity, shaped by periods of Chinese and Japanese rule, as well as internal political tensions and its relationship with mainland China. For a long time, Taiwanese culture struggled to fully assert itself and have its uniqueness recognised. Even today, questions of independence remain at the heart of political and geopolitical debates. Taipei embodies this hybrid identity: a crossroads of Han, Japanese, Indigenous, and Chinese cultures, where Taiwanese cinema emerges from these multiple influences, memories, and layered heritages.

The First Taiwanese New Wave emerged in the early 1980s, at a time when the local film industry was weakened by competition from Hong Kong productions. Breaking away from the melodramas and action films that had dominated until then, a new generation of directors introduced a more realist cinema, inspired by Italian neorealism and rooted in everyday Taiwanese life. Their films addressed themes such as urbanisation, social inequality, and the transformation of contemporary society, through freer storytelling and a rhythm closer to real life. Among the key figures of this movement are Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, who helped bring Taiwanese cinema to international recognition.

In the 1990s, a Second New Wave followed. While maintaining a keen focus on Taiwanese society, its films often adopted more accessible forms and experimented with new narrative structures. This generation is notably represented by Tsai Ming-liang, whose film Vive L’amour won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1994, and by Ang Lee, who quickly achieved international success. Together, they helped reshape the image of Taiwanese cinema while continuing to explore the island’s social, cultural, and identity transformations.

In collaboration with our co-programmers from the Taiwan Film Festival Berlin, we aim to bring these four major figures of Taiwanese cinema into dialogue with a new generation of filmmakers. Each contemporary film in this selection echoes one of these key directors, whether through its themes, perspective, or cinematic approach.

While films by other emblematic directors in this programme will be screened during L’Heure d’Été, those by Edward Yang will be presented after the festival in a dedicated retrospective, extending the discovery of his work and his influence on contemporary Taiwanese cinema.

Through these correspondences, this edition explores the connections between tradition and modernity, memory and oblivion, trauma and identity. It highlights the profound transformations of Taiwanese society and shows how cinema can become a unique and precious space of expression, turning everyday life into narrative.