The first Experimental Media Art Festival in Taiwan (EXIT) opened in Taipei yesterday featuring a wide range of avant-garde films from Asia and Canada that are rarely exhibited in museum galleries or screened in local film festivals.
The four-day festival will run simultaneously with the Asia Forum, during which film curators, researchers and artists will gather and share their views on how to integrate the resources and set up a transnational platform to market the experimental films made by Asian artists.
The first Asia Forum was held in Seoul last year. It will be the first time that movie lovers in Taiwan will be able to see experimental media works from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Canada in a single festival.
Tony Wu (吳俊輝), EXIT organizer, said that experimental films, unlike commercial features that provide fixed narrative styles and storylines, seek to engage in dialogue with viewers in a more direct way.
“Many of my students ask me how to understand experimental films, and I always tell them: ‘Just make some personal connections with the works and you will find that the filmmakers speak to you loudly,’” he said, adding that experimental films have actually played a vital part in making some of Taiwan’s most successful or award winning films.
An experimental artist himself, he said experimental films are often excluded from Taiwan’s contemporary art scene, making it difficult for the works be known to the public. Receiving only a NT$300,000 (US$10,000) grant from the Taipei City Government, Wu said he has borrowed NT$700,000 from family and friends to make EXIT happen.
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