Once upon a time New Left Review was in the vanguard of UK film culture, and once in a while it’s still capable of engaging. This piece on cultural tensions in Taiwan includes an interview with Hou Hsiao-Hsien which helps illuminate the background to his films, and those of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-Liang. Hou articulates something I was trying to get at here, which is the problem faced by filmmakers whose funding comes from the international art-house/festival circuit, but who are concerned to make films about their own cultures. Hou, like Kiarostami, like Ken Loach, depends on mostly French financing to make films about Taiwan, Iran, Britain, whose ‘native’ film industries have been less than supportive. It’s a precarious double-bind, if you bear in mind what happened to British cinema after American capital disappeared at the end of the Sixties.