Face by Tsai Ming-liang
With nine nominations, including best film and best director, Hong Kong filmmaker Clara Law’s romantic fantasy Like a Dream (right) leads the 2009 Golden Horse Awards.
Starring Daniel Wu and Yolanda Yuan (aka Quan Yuan), both of whom are up for acting awards, Like a Dream chronicles a man's search for a woman who keeps popping up in his dreams.
Two films received seven Golden Horse nods: Taiwanese filmmaker Leon Dai’s No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti and Chinese filmmaker Guan Hu’s Cow.
No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti is based on the true story of a poor waterfront worker who fought Taiwan's heartless bureaucrats for custody of his daughter. Among its Golden Horse nominations are those for best film, best director, best actor (Chen Wen-pin), and Taiwanese film of the Year. (I'm not sure why the title is in Spanish.)
In Cow, the Chinese communist army orders a peasant to look after a much-needed dairy cow during the harsh winter of 1940, when China was fighting Japan.
Tsai Ming-liang’s Visage / Face, which was up for a Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, garnered five nominations, including best film and best director. In Face, a Taiwanese director (Lee Kang-sheng) travels to the Louvre to shoot a film about the myth of Salome. Also in the cast: Fanny Ardant, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Baye, and Laetitia Casta.
Zhou Xun in The Message
Another entry with five nominations was Chen Kuo-fu and Gao Qunshu's espionage thriller The Message, which earned best actress nods for both Zhou Xun (2006 Golden Horse winner for Perhaps Love) and Li Bingbing.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha star Ziyi Zhang is up for a best supporting actress award for Chen Kaige's popular Forever Enthralled, the biopic of Peking opera singer Mei Lanfang (played by Lai Leon, who went nominationless).
The 2009 Golden Horse winners will be announced on Nov. 28.