Taiwan's cinema was a state instrument before it was anything else: the Nationalist party's own studio made Mandarin-language healthy realism while a parallel Taiwanese-dialect industry ran on nothing and was left to rot. The New Cinema that began in 1982 was made inside that same state studio, by young directors it had hired because they were cheap, and it produced two of the most rigorous filmmakers of the century. When martial law was lifted in 1987 Hou Hsiao-hsien immediately made a film about the massacre nobody had been permitted to mention, and it won the Golden Lion.