it looks like the new tsai ming-liang film may be censored before it shows in taiwan:

Peggy Chou, director of the GIO motion pictures department, insisted yesterday the movie, titled "Tian bian yi duo yun" in Chinese, has to be censored before it can be shown in Taiwan.

As shown in the German capital, The Wayward Cloud verges on pornography, according to Taiwan's obscenity law. Pubic hair is shown in a number of bed scenes, one of which describes oral sex.

All or at least part of them has to be edited out to conform to the law, according to Chou.

She would call a preview of the film in Taipei shortly to make a decision. It will be viewed by a panel of judges.

i don't know why there is such a fear of showing pubic hair. i mean in the past i've seen stories about wife swapping on tv on a sunday afternoon and even spotted japanese porn about groping young women on trains in the evening, a little pubic hair in a film in the cinema hardly seems worth this sort of hoopla. i wonder if they apply this kind of censorship to artworks in museums? somehow i doubt it.

in this interview tsai has this to say about the nudity in the film:

"I really prefer not to talk about how much nudity there is in this movie because that is totally not the point. As with all my previous movies, 'The Wayward Cloud' is about the emotional life of these characters. Talking about the amount of nudity involved will simply mislead the audience," Tsai asserts. "As a director, I also need to protect my actors. They give me their trust and strip naked to perform these characters for the sake of art. They deserve our utmost respect. This is not a porn movie. This is a movie about human emotions."

hopefully the censors will take into consideration this sort of thing when deciding whether they will censor it or not. of course aside from the evils of censorship, i just hope the film will have english subs when it does screen.