‘The Cli-Fi Movie Awards’
With all the news about climate change and global warming over the past few years filling the news pages of the Taipei Times, from international news to local news stories, the subject has taken on a wider profile worldwide. I recently started a global project based in Taiwan, but with a global outreach, to spotlight nominees and winners of a new movie-awards event that I have dubbed “The Cli-Fi Movie Awards,” or “The Cliffies.”
The platform I have created is set to announce the winners for the best cli-fi movies of this year on Feb. 15 next year, one week before the Oscars are announced in Hollywood. While it might seem strange at first for a Hollywood event to emanate from a small office in Taiwan, we now live in an interconnected world where climate change issues impact us all.
Cli-fi is a new genre of movies that was coined a few years ago, and the term has caught on with English-language media in the US, the UK and Australia, with news articles about “cli-fi” appearing in the New York Times, the Guardian and Time magazine, among a dozen other publications in North America and Europe.
The Cliffies came out of the media discussion of the genre and it is my hope that The Cliffies become an annual movie-awards event, eventually broadcast on US television and hosted by Hollywood actors. For now, it is a mom-and-pop affair, low-key and with no sponsors.
In a recent article by Shane Harris in Foreign Policy magazine headlined Water Wars, the cli-fi meme took on a new urgency.
“Public anxiety — and fascination — has given rise to a new genre of films, ‘cli-fi,’ with apocalyptic climate-change scenarios at the heart of their stories,” the report said.
As I see it and as I am planning it, the purpose of The Cliffies is to raise awareness of climate-related issues through movies.
The independent awards program is not about glamor or movie stars, but about the future of our planet. Hollywood can do a lot to help raise awareness about climate change and global warming.
With that in mind, nominations are coming in for this year’s best cli-fi movies and the winners are to be announced in mid-February from a Web platform based in Taiwan.
Among the best picture nominees are Into the Storm and Interstellar from Hollywood, Snowpiercer from South Korea, and The Rover by Australian director David Michod, with best actor nods going to Ed Harris, Tilda Swinton and Robert Pattinson, among others.
A small, but important, awards category is for best children’s cli-fi movie of the year, and among the nominees is a local cartoon series titled Weather Boy! (觀測站少年), produced by Tainan-based animation director Chiu Li-wei (邱立偉).
While climate change is a big issue with global repercussions, a small Taiwanese cartoon series is also in the running for a Cliffie next year, and I for one hope Chiu’s work wins in the kids category. Weather Boy! has already been shown on PTS TV here in Taiwan, and overseas rights are being negotiated for screenings in several other nations.
Nominations for The Cliffies are still being accepted until the end of December. Just e-mail your selections to:TheCliffies2015@gmail.com
Dan Bloom
Chiayi City
When US budget carrier Southwest Airlines last week announced a new partnership with China Airlines, Southwest’s social media were filled with comments from travelers excited by the new opportunity to visit China. Of course, China Airlines is not based in China, but in Taiwan, and the new partnership connects Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport with 30 cities across the US. At a time when China is increasing efforts on all fronts to falsely label Taiwan as “China” in all arenas, Taiwan does itself no favors by having its flagship carrier named China Airlines. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is eager to jump at
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows recently when he declared the era of American unipolarity over. He described America’s unrivaled dominance of the international system as an anomaly that was created by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Now, he observed, the United States was returning to a more multipolar world where there are great powers in different parts of the planet. He pointed to China and Russia, as well as “rogue states like Iran and North Korea” as examples of countries the United States must contend with. This all begs the question:
Liberals have wasted no time in pointing to Karol Nawrocki’s lack of qualifications for his new job as president of Poland. He has never previously held political office. He won by the narrowest of margins, with 50.9 percent of the vote. However, Nawrocki possesses the one qualification that many national populists value above all other: a taste for physical strength laced with violence. Nawrocki is a former boxer who still likes to go a few rounds. He is also such an enthusiastic soccer supporter that he reportedly got the logos of his two favorite teams — Chelsea and Lechia Gdansk —
RSS