Get to the box office while you can, because tickets for this year's Golden Horse Film Festival, which starts this weekend, are selling fast.
To help our readers through the Kafkaesque process of buying tickets for this year's festival, the Taipei Times has deciphered the festival's inexcusably complicated brochure and Web site and filtered out the relevant ticket-buying information.
There are four types of tickets for this year's festival (two of which have silly confusing names): the Bin Go pass, the Pass Go pass, advance single-screening tickets and single-screening tickets purchased the day of the screening.
Today is the last day to purchase the Bin Go and the Pass Go passes.
The Bin Go pass costs NT$2,001 and provides you with 12 vouchers that can be exchanged for 12 individual-screening tickets. The Bin Go pass can be purchased at the Tunhua South Road, Hsimen and Taipei Railway Station branches of Eslite Bookstore and at the ERA ticketing outlet main office on 46 Pateh Rd., Sec. 1 (
The Pass Go pass costs NT$2,001 and allows festival-goers to view any weekday screening before 6pm. The pass can be purchased at the Kingstone Bookstore on Chunghsiao East Road and the Hess Bookstore at Warner Village. With the Pass Go pass, movie-viewers are to show up at the theater within an hour of the screening time to get a ticket for the screening. However, it is possible, although unlikely according to organizers, that daytime screenings will be sold out. It is not possible to obtain advance tickets to screenings with the Pass Go pass.
The third way to view screenings is to purchase tickets to individual screenings in advance at any ERA ticketing outlet by calling (02) 2341-9898.
Finally, there is the traditional method of buying a ticket, which consists of showing up at the theater on time for the individual screening.
Beware, though, that both screenings for several of the most popular movies in the festival have already sold out.
Tickets for both Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien's (
Andy Warhol's 1967 film Chelsea Girls and Songs From the Second Floor by Swedish filmmaker and commercial director Roy Anderson have also sold out, but organizers are likely to schedule additional screenings to try to meet the overwhelming interest in these movies.
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