“This is a reel of film that is deteriorated and brittle. It will never be brought back to life,” Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) chairman Tony Lan (藍祖蔚) said at the institute, holding aloft a canister from a collection of more than 18,000 Taiwanese movies, to help visiting lawmakers fully understand the race against time to find a new home for the institute’s film archive center.
Lan and his staff have for years been collecting and preserving copies of films made by Taiwanese directors from around the world in their archives.
However, as the institute’s hodgepodge of storage spaces are