Arvin Chen at Tribeca Film Festival
Article by Gai DaGai
Photo credit: Niko
We had the chance to attend the screening of “WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW,” a competition title from Taiwan for this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Director Arvin Chen also attended the screening and it was a sold out first screening as a lot of people are fans of Chen especially, this fresh comedy is the only Mandarin film in TFF’s World Narrative category and will compete for major prizes along with other 11 international titles.
Arvin Chen at Tribeca Film Festival
Arvin Chen was born in Boston and grew up in the Bay Area. Arvin Chen graduated from University of California Berkeley, majoring in architecture. And soon after he went back to Taiwan and apprenticed with filmmaker Edward Yang. And in 2006 Arvin Chen earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in University of Southern California. Arvin Chen produced his first film “Au Revoir Taipei,” a Taiwanese romantic comedy film in 2013. The film won Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema prize at the Berlin International Film Festival 2010 and was considered a box office success in Taiwan.
Arvin Chen at Tribeca Film Festival
Arvin Chen latest production is “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” a mandarin comedy about a man who is married for nine years and has a son, but at his engagement party he finds himself longing for his gay past. To make matters wittier his wife wants to have another child. This film is based on stories of gay men and women who know they are gay and is openly living their life about it, but then decides to get marry in order to fulfill familial obligations.
The leading actors of the movie, 任賢齊 Richie Jen (Wei-chung), 范曉萱 Mavis Fan (Feng), and 石頭 Stone (San-San), who are all very well-known musicians in Asia. Many people were shocked to see them play such an everyday characters in this film.
Arvin Chen hopes that with this first screening in North America, despite the fact that it is a Taiwanese movie, he wants to the audience of Tribeca to connect with the characters, the story, and the problems of everyday life and love in Taipei. “Since I’m from the US and this is our first screening in North America, my biggest hope is that audiences will still be able to connect to the characters and the story despite it being a Taiwanese movie, and that the problems of everyday life and love in Taipei the movie depicts will still resonate with audiences in Tribeca.”
After the screening, an audience asked director Chen are all the Taiwanese men as reserved as those characters in the movie, Chen said “for some reasons, at my movies, men are always weaker than women! So I guess it’s just me”. Another audience also asked why director Chen chose those pop stars and cast them in such an opposite roles of their real life personality, example Stone (San-San) is actually a rocker from the most popular band Mayday (五月天)? Chen responded “well in Asia, every singer has to know how to act in some ways and it’s very common to use pop stars for leading movie or TV roles so it’s the culture though I don’t understand why but all the actors in this movie did a wonderful job!”
Arvin Chen hopes to show the world the daily life of Taiwanese. Chen’s next project is a movie on rich housewives in China and he would like to features Taiwanese, Chinese and American characters, giving a cross-cultural craze of comedy.
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