As a result of recent political infighting in Greater Kaohsiung, the 2014 Kaohsiung Film Festival (KFF高雄電影節) almost did not take place. It faced the possibility of cancellation in February when drastic budget cuts by the Greater Kaohsiung city council left festival organizers with no money. However, a supplementary budget enabled the festival, which opens today and features more than 170 feature, documentary, animated and short films, to go forward.
FILM NOIR
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung Film Festival
Film noir is a major focus this year, says festival curator Huang Hao-jie (黃皓傑).
“Film noir grew out of the Great Depression. Plenty of crime and detective films told stories about an individual at an impasse in a corrupt environment, and resorting to street justice as the system breaks down,” he says.
Chinatown (1974) is among the selected noir classics. Starring a young, hard-boiled Jack Nicholson as a private detective whose investigation into an adultery case leads to a vast conspiracy, it presents a compelling portrait of society’s evils. The biopic Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the notorious 1930s outlaw couple, is meant to capture America’s counter-culture movement of the late 1960s.
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung Film Festival
Fast forward to the present, and Argentine director Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales is composed of six standalone shorts, often subversively funny and all them tackling the themes of violence, antagonisms and vengeance in everyday life. Huang says the screenings are almost sold out, a fact he attributes to the viewer’s facility in projecting their own frustrations and anger onto the characters and stories.
GOING CLOUD
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung Film Festival
Despite its bumpy beginning, KFF takes the lead with KFF Cloud Cinema (2014雄影雲端戲院). Available on Google Play and App Store for NT$180, the mobile app allows viewers to watch more than 100 films grouped under the international short film section, including the 70 nominated films at this year’s short film competition, during the festival period.
Huang says that compared to Taipei, fewer people in Kaohsiung are used to watching films on mobile phones or other handheld devices. The initiative is therefore aimed to make better use of the growing collection of short films the KFF has built from its annual competition.
“With a limited budget, how do we keep the platform alive and working after the festival ends. How do we manage it so that when people think of short films, they might come to the platform? I think it depends on whether or not we can build a rich archive to attract people,” Huang says.
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung Film Festival
He adds that, if successful, the app-based platform could become an alternative venue for short films that rarely have a chance to be shown in public.
Supporting short filmmaking is also a way nurture new talent. For the past two years, the Kaohsiung Film Archive (高雄市電影館) has been providing subsidies for short works to the festival’s organizers. This year’s recipients include Huang Hsin-yao’s (黃信堯) The Great Buddha (大佛) and Cheng Wei-hao’s (程偉豪) The Death of a Security Guard (保全員之死) — both of which will be screened at the festival.
SUNFLOWER MOVEMENT
In response to the Sunflower movement, the festival organizers put together a highlighted event featuring three works from the newly completed Sunflower Occupation (太陽 ‧ 不遠), a compilation of 10 short documentaries about the occupation of Legislative Yuan by filmmakers from the Taipei Documentary Filmmakers’ Union (台北市紀錄片從業人員職業工會).
Kaohsiung rockers Fire Ex (滅火器) and Hakka folk icon Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥) are invited to perform when the films are shown. The event begins at 7pm on Sunday at Kaohsiung’s Pier 2 Arts Center (高雄駁二藝術特區), 1 Dayong Rd, Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市大勇路1號). For more information, go to the festival’s bilingual Web site at www.kff.tw.
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