Race To Find Then Restore Classic Postwar Films

Published 07/07/2026 16:26

By Kris Ma/John Van Trieste

Film restorers are racing to find lost titles and restore damaged reels made during Taiwan's flowering postwar era of cinema.

Saving Taiwan’s Lost Films

REPORTER:

In rural central Taiwan, a worker stacks piles of metal containers—each containing a piece of history. Supervising the work is Wang Wei, who’s been hunting for these treasures for ten years.

The canisters hold old film reels, relics of a golden age of Taiwanese cinema that’s largely disappeared. These reels are among the small number that have survived decades of decay in Taiwan’s hot and wet climate. Wang says there’s not much time left for whatever undiscovered reels might still be out there—and as one successful hunt all the way in Los Angeles shows, you never know where they might turn up.

Wang Wei (TAIWAN FILM AND AUDIOVISUAL INSTITUTE):

Film reels are constantly deteriorating so we have to work hard to track them down as quickly as possible over these final few years. Otherwise, as I just mentioned once these things are discarded or ruined they can never be recovered.

REPORTER:

Films like these flourished in the mid-1950’s to late ‘60’s—a repressive but culturally productive time in Taiwan. There’s local opera, comedy, romance and drama—something for everyone. What ties them together is their language.

At the time, the recently arrived Kuomintang government favored Mandarin. But not everyone had a good grasp of it, and so filmmakers embraced local Taiwanese Taigi, or Taiwanese Hokkien.

With low budgets and fast turn-around, these films weren’t the most polished. But until TV replaced them, they were the voice of a generation—and a record of a Taiwan that is now only a far-off memory. Saving them has become a national project, and Wang Wei’s far from the only one doing their part.

REPORTER:

86-year-old film projectionist Wang Chin-ting has kept some titles safely protected for years. He keeps them here in his ancestral house, where he moved back in 2010.

Wang Chin-ting (FILM PROJECTIONIST):

Every single years since 2010 I have manually wound through these films. If a film wasn't being screened, I would wind it. If it was being screened, I wouldn't. That is the only reason these films haven't been ruined and haven't gone moldy or lost their color.

REPORTER:

Leading the effort to save these films is the government-funded Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. In its lab-like restoration center in New Taipei, film is put in cold storage until it’s ready for specialists to fix by hand. Then, there’s digital clean-up.

The institute's chair Arthur Chu says rigor is key in saving this cache of Taiwanese heritage.

Arthur Chu (CHAIR, TAIWAN FILM AND AUDIOVISUAL INSTITUTE):

We must ensure that our own restoration and preservation techniques in Taiwan meet international standards. Only then can we show greater respect and care for the feature films, documentaries, and newsreels shot by our predecessors which truly represent the collective memory of our people.

REPORTER:

The question is how much of this collective memory can be saved, even with new techniques. So far, preservationists have only salvaged around a sixth of the 1,200-or-so Hokkien titles from this postwar period. And as all in this project know well, once film is gone, it’s gone forever, another voice from the past erased.