Health authorities are calling on Taiwan’s movie industry to avoid showing people smoking cigarettes in locally made movies. Health Promotion Administration Director-General Chiu Shu-ti said that it’s a bad influence on children.
“We want to urge everyone in the movie industry to make movies that help young people, rather than set a bad example," said Chiu.
"We hope that in the future, movies can avoid putting an emphasis on smoking. If it’s an old movie with that sort of scene, then it needs to have a warning, and new movies with smoking scenes should be given a “restricted” rating. That way we can prevent children and teenagers from being exposed to smoking scenes.”
According to the administration, 56.8% of all Chinese-language films shown in Taiwan in the last seven years contained scenes in which a character smoked. That’s much higher than in foreign films, of which 37.4% showed smoking.
Of the top ten films with the most smoking scenes shown in Taiwan, seven were Chinese language movies. The Taiwanese box office hit “Monga”, about gangsters, featured the highest number of smoking scenes – 120 in total. Smoking was featured in almost every minute of the film.
Chiu spoke about measures taken by movie industries in other countries, like India. She said that Bollywood had banned all movies with smoking scenes in them.
Chiu said that the United States was also set to give a “PG-13” rating for movies which feature smoking. That means children under 13 will be prohibited from watching them, while children between 13 and 17 will require parental guidance.