Postcard: Taipei

Chalk it down to a previous life spent studying business management, but Hsieh Chun-yi was under no illusions about the modern marketplace when he started planning his first feature film.

The 35-year-old Taiwanese director says he turned to cinema in order to satisfy a desire to have his views on the world around him heard - but realised that there was no point airing those views if no one came to see his film.

"I wanted first to make cinema so people could hear my voice and could see things that I see in the world, but now I realise there is more to cinema that that," says Hsieh, who turned away from studying business to make short films and study filmmaking at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts programme in Singapore.

"People want a good story, they want to feel the story and to connect to it. I can put my voice in there somewhere but I know I have to connect with the audience and show things that they can respond to. That's what I hope I have done with my first film and that's why I made this type of comedy," he says.

The compromise, if it can even be called that, is Hsieh's feature debut, Apolitical Romance (formerly known as Unpolitical Romance). This engaging look at cross-straits relationships shows Hsieh's commercial smarts by turning to the genre that Taiwan's film industry has made its own: the romantic comedy.

The past two years have seen a stream of romantic comedies emerging from Taiwan, inspired by the exploits of Giddens Ko Ching-teng's wistful You Are the Apple of My Eye, which took US$25 million across Asia after costing US$1.7 million to make.

Hsieh thinks some of the success of Taiwanese rom-coms stems from the fact that the island's new generation of filmmakers have been inspired by the films of such acclaimed auteurs as Edward Yang De-chang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, directors with reputations for their down-to-earth attitudes and subject matter.