A banner year for Chinese films and filmmakers at the 61st Taipei Golden Horse Awards has attracted much attention on Chinese social media, despite strict ongoing censorship of any topic connected to the awards. This year’s Golden Horse Award winners, announced on November 23, include Best Narrative Feature and Best Director for Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film,” a work of docu-fiction about a film crew caught up in the COVID pandemic lockdown of Wuhan; Best Leading Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and the Audience Choice Award for “Bel Ami,” Geng Jun’s LGBTQ+-themed black comedy; and Best Adapted Screenplay for Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Above the Dust,” a coming-of-age film that casts a critical eye on events in PRC history (including 1950s land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the massive famine that ensued).

Chinese actors and films have technically been banned from participating in the Golden Horse Awards since 2019, after a 2018 award-ceremony speech in which Taiwanese director Fu Yue expressed her wish for Taiwan to be treated as “an independent entity.” Despite this restriction, films from China (including some co-produced films) made up over 200 of this year’s record-high 718 Golden Horse Film Festival submissions from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia.

A recent CDT Chinese post notes that the film review site Douban has scrubbed any mention of the Golden Horse Awards or award winners from the site, and Weibo search results for "Golden Horse Awards" (金马奖, Jīn Mǎ Jiǎng) are restricted to content posted by certified “blue V” accounts. Despite this, some articles about the awards that omitted or altered director names and film titles are still circulating online. For example, an article from WeChat account “Super-Sauce Movie Paradise” (超酱的电影天堂, Chāo Jiàng de Diànyǐng Tiāntáng) managed to escape censorship by employing some extensive linguistic sleight-of-hand:

• Writing director Lou Ye’s name in pinyin instead of Chinese characters.
• Altering the Chinese title of Lou Ye’s winning film “An Unfinished Film”《一部未完成的电影》( Yībù Wèiwánchéng de Diànyǐng) to “An Unmentioned Film”《一部未能提及的电影》(Yībù Wèinéng Tíjí de Diànyǐng).
• Writing the Chinese title of the quadruple award-winning “Bel Ami”《漂亮朋友》(Piàoliang Péngyou, meaning "Beautiful Friend/s") in pinyin.
• Replacing the character 小 (Xiǎo) in director Wang Xiaoshuai’s (王小帅) name with the placeholder character 某 (mǒu), resulting in something like “Wang Someone-Shuai.”
• Altering the Chinese title of Wang Xiaoshuai’s Best Adapted Screenplay winner “Above the Dust” from《沃土》(Wòtǔ, meaning “Fertile Soil”) to “Something-Soil”《某土》(Mǒutǔ).
• Deleting a few potentially controversial winners from the list: Hong Kong-based filmmaker Shek Ka-chun’s “Father Figure” for Best Animated Short; seasoned set director and spray-paint artist Li Si-jian for Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year; and Hong Kong filmmakers Chan Cheuk-sze and Kathy Wong’s Best Documentary Short “Colour Ideology Sampling.mov,” which explores the political significance of clothing colors worn by demonstrators in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chinese censorship of the Golden Horse Awards has persisted since 2019, and was particularly noticeable in 2021, when Hong Kong director Kiwi Chow won Best Documentary Film for “Revolution of Our Times,” about the 2019-2020 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. At the time, many Weibo and Douban users who posted comments supportive of the film later had their comments deleted by platform censors.

As AFP reported this week, amid tightening film censorship in China and Hong Kong, Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards have become an essential platform for Chinese filmmakers whose artistic output is not always welcomed back home:

Ahead of the awards, MAC spokesman Liang Wen-chieh told reporters that these films "may not be able to be screened in mainland China, but they still hope to have a free platform to participate and express themselves".

[…] Despite political tensions, Golden Horse remained a stage for independent Chinese films that have no distribution space on the mainland, Taiwanese film critic Wonder Weng told AFP.

"This spirit remains unchanged. I think the Golden Horse Awards have always insisted on being the benchmark" that is open to all subjects, said Weng, who is a board member of Taiwan Film Critics Society.

[…] "Lou [Ye] put images that are banned or blocked into his work and reminds us that there is a director who is willing to preserve historical images for us to see… and let us know there is a different voice," Weng said. [Source]