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The Pen and the Camera: WU Nianzhen, Portrait of an Almost Forgotten Hero of the Taiwan New Cinema Shu Kei Dean of Film and Television Academy of Performing Arts, Hong Kong WU Nianzhen (吳念真 b. 1952) is one of the most important figures responsible for the rise of the Taiwan New Cinema. He started as a screenwriter in 1978 and won the first of his five Golden Horse Best Script Awards in 19681 with《同班同學》, for which he was hired by the government-funded CMPC (Central Motion Picture Corporation) as Script Supervisor in the Production Unit. In 1982, together with his close friend and senior Xiao Ye（小野）, he coordinated the production of In Our Time （光陰的故事）, a portmanteau film that heralded the Taiwan New Cinema. Since then, he had been responsible for the scripts of a number of ground-breaking works of the movement, including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s（侯孝賢）The Sandwich Man (兒子的大 玩偶，1983), Dust in the Wind (戀戀風塵，1986), City of Sadness (悲情城市，1989), Puppet Master (戲夢人生，1993); Edward Yang’s（楊德昌）That Day on the Beach (海灘的一天，1983) and Zhen Zhuangxiang’s （曾壯祥）Woman of Wrath (殺夫， 1986). He also appeared as an actor in Yang’s Taipei Story (青梅竹馬，1985) , Mahjong (麻將，1996) and YiYi (一一，2000). In 1986, he (and publisher Zhan Hongzhi 詹宏志) drafted the “Taiwan Cinema Manifesto,” a historic and earth-shattering document signed by over 70 filmmakers, writers and journalists from Taiwan and Hong Kong. He made his directorial debut, A Borrowed Life（多桑）, in 1994, garnering the Best Film Award at Torino International Festival of Young Cinema and the FIPRESCI Award at Thessaloniki Film Festival, as well as being quoted by Martin Scorsese as one of his most favourite film of the 1990s. A prolific screenwriter