The Venice film festival has become the focus of the increasingly bitter row between Taiwan and China regarding the sovereignty of the Taiwanese state. Protests have been filed by Taiwan’s Government Information Office and Taiwanese production company ARS after big budget movie Seediq Bale was listed as originating from Taiwan AND China.

Seediq Bale produc r Jimmy Huang was quick to confirm that the movie is a “pure Taiwan-made film and not a film made by Taiwan and China.” The movie in question is Taiwan’s biggest budget production of all time costing around $24.3m and the subject matter, the 1930 Wushe Incident where the people rose up against the colonial Japanese forces, may have made the film makers particularly sensitive to the issue of Taiwanese Independence from China.

The issue of Taiwan’s independence is a very sensitive political issue. China’s communist government does regard the pacific island as part of their territory but Taiwan disputes this. The film festival has a history of listing Taiwanese productions as “Taiwan, China” as it did so in 2007 with Ang Lee’s Lust. It may be that the film organisers are wary of the political issue or it could also be that the inclusion of China in the film listing is because the movie’s executive producer John Woo is from Hong Kong.

Either way Taiwanese movie companies have long been sensitive to this issue. 2010 saw the cancellation of a Taipai week at the Shanghai film festival because film makers were opposed to their movies being listed as “Taiwan, China” instead of being from Taiwan
as a separate territory.