The festival's platform for Taiwanese cinema has quickly gained international visibility, this year attracting curators and film professionals from South Korea, Japan and Singapore to the Netherlands and Canada.
But as its reputation increases, TFF faces a bureaucratic quandary. As an event organized under the auspices of the Taipei City Government, the festival is subject to regulations that prevent it from having a permanent executive body.
The rules were designed to prevent abuses of power, but they are damaging the vitality of the film festival since, unlike other government-funded film festivals throughout the world, TFF's organizers have to put things together in a shorter period of time and cannot plan for the future.
This year's festival director Jane Yu (游惠貞) said the problem started when the law was promulgated in 2000. An improvement was made after then-Taipei City Bureau of Cultural Affairs head Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) consulted with curators and professionals and found a way to allow teams to work for two consecutive years. But lingering uncertainty and budget cuts caused the previous organizer to withdraw last year.
"Sustainability is the most important element in a cultural undertaking. With the managerial uncertainty, long-term planning is out of the question, let alone the accumulation of learning, experience, contacts and training [that is] essential to cultural events like film festivals," Yu said.
A more viable solution is to establish a permanent executive body and a term system that would allow a festival director to hold the position for a longer period of time.
Despite these problems, TFF's current director maintains a can-do spirit. "There are far too many defects is the system, but we have to keep working and try to solve problems along the way," Yu said.
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