Liu Hsiu-ying (劉秀英) could not believe her ears when she heard that the Kaohsiung Film Archive’s (高雄市電影館) annual budget was to be cut almost in half. Translated into reality, she quickly realized, it would mean cancelling one of its most important events: the Kaohsiung Film Festival (高雄電影節).
“For two, three weeks, we stood by at the [Greater Kaohsiung] city council in case we needed to answer councilor inquiries during the review sessions … Then we were suddenly informed that it was done. In one hour, the budgets were grouped together and slashed, and we were given no opportunity to voice our opinions. That we cannot accept,” Liu, who is director of the archive, told the Taipei Times.
BUDGET SLASHING
Photo: Yang Ching-ching, Taipei Times
In February, the Greater Kaohsiung city council slashed the city government’s income for this year by NT$5.7 billion (US$188 million), equivalent to 4.7 percent of the municipal government’s annual income. Compared to Taipei’s NT$1.4 billion in cuts, NT$350 million for Greater Taichung and Greater Tainan’s NT$14 million, the budget cut for Greater Kaohsiung is the most severe among Taiwan’s five special municipalities.
To break even, the city government is required to slash NT$5.7 billion from planned expenditures. However, instead of reviewing the budget of expenditures item by item, the city councilors bundled the budgets of a number of government institutions — tourism, labor and culture — together in the amount of NT$280 million, and bumped them all off together. Greater Kaohsiung’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, for example, had NT$60 million hacked off its budget, much of it affecting the Kaohsiung Film Archive, Kaohsiung Museum of History (高雄市立歷史博物館) and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (高雄市立美術館).
Kuo Tien-kuei (郭添貴), the bureau’s deputy director, calls this year’s cuts unexpected, unprecedented and, the fact that they targeted specific programs, extremely unusual.
Photo: Yang Ching-ching, Taipei Times
“If they had left the decision up to us to make financial adjustments, we certainly wouldn’t have slashed the budgets of such important institutions,” he says.
DEJA VU
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors say the cuts are politically motivated. The pan-blue camp, consisting of the People First Party and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), hold a majority of seats in the council, and Hsu Kun-yuan (許崑源) of the KMT is said to have used his position as council speaker to push the cuts through. DPP city councilors walked out of the negotiations in protest.
The DPP’s council caucus claims the cuts are meant to dampen the popularity of Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), who is set to run for re-election in the year-end mayoral elections. But the KMT council caucus counters that, with the highest amount of city debt in the nation, the decision was made to focus on expenditures and thus stop the city government from taking out loans and selling public property, which would only affect its income.
Having focused on cultural and environmental issues during his work at the council for the past 12 years, City Councilor Wu Yi-cheng (吳益政) of the People First Party says that he is personally opposed to the way the budgets were cut. But he insists that the decision has less to do with partisan clashes than it does the city government’s financial situation.
“It is true that the common practice is to review the budget of expenditures item by item. But since the debt ratio has been high for the past two to three years, we spend a lot more time discussing the government’s sources of income, leaving little time to review the [planned] expenditures,” he says.
The items grouped into the NT$280 million budget cuts were decided by the city councilors in accordance with review suggestions submitted by the council committees, Wu adds.
CULTURAL DAMAGE
Critics, however, say it is inexcusable to sacrifice funding for the city’s arts and cultural activities such as the Kaohsiung Film Festival, if organizers can cover the expenses.
Film scholar and curator Ryan Cheng (鄭秉泓) calls the budget cuts a “malicious” act by city councilors, noting that the Kaohsiung Film Archive, with staff members mostly coming from the city’s culture bureau, has strived hard to cultivate audiences and transform it into an art-house cinema, a rarity anywhere outside Taipei.
“They are willing to learn, work hard and curate programs that express local points of view,” says Cheng, who has worked at the archive for several years.
Huang Hao-jie (黃皓傑), curator of the Kaohsiung Film Festival, agrees, pointing out that the arts and cultural scene is a relatively new phenomenon in the industrial city.
“Because of the film festival and the continuous efforts of the archive, the city’s art-house audience has grown, and film distributors consequently show more interest in screening independent films here ... People from neighboring towns, cities and even Taipei come to the festival,” Huang says.
“A decade ago, if you said you were going to visit Greater Kaohsiung [to see a movie], people would be like, ‘Huh?’”
Liu says that with the city council slashing more than NT$18 million from its annual budget of NT$40 million, the film archive can only maintain its regular screenings this year. The film festival budget has disappeared. So have the archive’s annual subsidies for short films. Previous recipients include The Palace on the Sea (海上皇宮) by upcoming Burmese-Taiwanese auteur Midi Z (趙德胤) and Hsu Han-chiang’s (徐漢強) The Great Escape from Cafe City (小清新大爆炸).
HISTORY OF CONFLICT
It’s not the first time that the film archive has sparred with the city council.
Selected to be screened at the Kaohsiung Film Festival in 2009, The 10 Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur rights activist and campaigner Rebiya Kadeer, who has been living in the US since 2005 after she was released from a prison in China, spurred protests from the city’s tourism sector that were spearheaded by Hsu Kun-yuan, who was a city councilor at the time. Representatives of the local tourism industry pressed the local government to cancel the screenings. Showing the film, they said, would result in hotel cancellations from Chinese tourists.
“It was a warning sign. Before that, we never imagined that what we showed in Taiwan would have anything to do with China. But as China’s economic control over Taiwan increases, it can exert influence, make you feel pressured and have a say in what you show to people,” Huang says.
Hsu Kun-yuan publicly vowed to cut the film archive’s budget if the documentary was shown. But despite these threats, festival organizers went ahead and screened the film.
Whether or not an early warning of things to come, the event has been removed from this year’s city budget. Apart from the film festival and subsidies for short filmmaking, many of the city’s cultural and art events face the threat of cancellation.
The budget cuts are also going to affect the international book fair; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts’ annual exhibition on past masters; the Kaohsiung International Lion Dance Festival (國際戲獅甲藝術節) and the International Kaohsiung Puppet Theater Festival (高雄國際偶戲節).
Kuo says one way out of the impasse is to negotiate a supplementary budget. However, further negotiations are required to decide on the amount of this budget and how it will be allotted.
“Financial strain is nothing new. Every year we have financial difficulties, but we still need to do what needs to be done. Without a doubt, the abrupt budget cuts deliver a blow to Greater Kaohsiung’s cultural infrastructure,” he says.
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