Taiwanese-produced short film The Cell was screened at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York as part of the four-day Dance on Camera Festival on Saturday.
It was featured in the Global Shorts category alongside German-produced Mother Melancholia and British-produced Transparent, after it was selected from among more than 290 submissions from 35 countries.
The 51st edition of the festival features 13 categories and is to end today.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Culture
The Cell was choreographed by Tsai Po-cheng (蔡博丞), choreographer and artistic director of B.DANCE, and filmed by Ho Meng-hsueh (何孟學).
The performance on which The Cell is based was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic and is Tsai’s fifth full-length work.
As pandemic restrictions made live performances at international festivals impossible, Tsai collaborated with Ho to turn it into a short film, which they realized as part of a Ministry of Culture program to help artists affected by the restrictions reach a larger audience.
Tsai in a statement thanked the ministry, saying that the film was nominated at international festivals in Berlin, Tokyo and Brussels soon after its premiere last year.
“Even without live performances, we can still show people the beauty of dance on the screen,” Tsai said.
Describing the challenge of turning the performance into a film, Ho said he and Tsai had to film many parts multiple times and use several effects.
The ministry’s program supported 177 performances and screened them online to a paying audience of 480,000 people.
The ministry said the program sought to ensure that artists could continue to create performances during the pandemic.
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