Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Awards will not be restricted to competitors from China's mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan this year, but will instead welcome Chinese movies from all over the world.

Wang Qinghua, secretary general of Golden Horse Awards Executive Committee said on Tuesday that this move follows a developing trend in film festivals around the world.

In recent years, more than 380 movies were produced in China, only 20 of which were from Taiwan.

An official from the China Film Group said the depression in the Taiwan film industry affects the force and recognition of the Golden Horse Film Awards, and has directly led to the reform.

Yu Dong from Polybona Film Publishing Company suggests that the three film awards in China - the Golden Rooster Awards, the Hong Kong Film Awards, and the Golden Horse Awards - should be combined in order to raise international recognition of the Chinese film industry.

Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang's chess master biography Wu Qingyuan was originally excluded from the competition at last year's Golden Horse Awards, since 90 percent of the words spoken in the movie are Japanese - preventing it from qualifying as a "Chinese language movie.”

Wang Qinghua indicated that the Wu Qingyuan incident, which also brought non-linguistic disputes into play, might have been the direct trigger for these reforms.

And though positive, he also expressed his concerns: "Though the loosening of applicants' constraints is an admirable principle, the details are often difficult to implement."

(CRI.cn March 15, 2007)