The indie film fest brought its glamor to Taipei last weekend with a new generation of Taiwan’s transnational glitterati looking to set up shop in the nation’s captial
By David Frazier / Contributing reporter
In the spring of 2021, while the entire world was plagued with COVID lockdowns, a rather unique event was held in Taiwan, which by that time had emerged as a utopian, virus-free bubble in the midst of the global pandemic. The Stone Soup Social was organized by Taiwanese-American Patrick Lee, a cofounder of one of the most influential Web sites in the Hollywood film industry, Rottentomatoes.com, and it was hosted by another Taiwanese-American, Janet Hsieh (謝怡芬), the television personality who became famous as a travel show host in the 2000s and whose face is even now ubiquitous on advertising around Taiwan. But most importantly, it assembled an elite crowd of several hundred, defining a new generation of Taiwan’s transnational glitterati in the fields of entertainment, tech and finance.
The key cohort among them were a generation of Taiwanese-Americans, including several tech world “rock stars” and high profile celebrities like Hsieh living between Taipei, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. For the most part, they’d “returned” to Taiwan as COVID refugees, but many were in fact rediscovering their homeland for the first time. The question on everyone’s lips that night was: what can we do for Taiwan? How can we apply our success to help this place?
“All these people have successful careers in the US and now they choose to give back, and the place they choose to give back is here,” said Welly Yang (楊呈偉), a Taiwanese-American Broadway actor and producer of musicals who was in Taipei last weekend.
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival Asia
Fast forward two years, and the seeds planted at that Stone Soup Social have begun to bear fruit. The man Hsieh interviewed on stage at that 2021 event, Kevin Lin (林士斌), is now part of the team at G2GO that last weekend brought America’s biggest brand in independent film, Sundance, to Taiwan for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival Asia.
HOLLYWOOD VIBE
Held at the SPOT Cinema in Huashan, the three-day Sundance event was streamlined in film offerings, with just four film programs and nine screenings. But its true strength lay in the elements Taiwan’s biggest festivals often lack, including the ceremony of black tie attire, gala dinners, networking parties, late nights at local nightclubs and real Hollywood star power.
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival Asia
Panel discussion speakers included Justin Lin (林詣彬), the director of five films in the Fast and Furious franchise, Hollywood director and screenwriter George Huang, producer of The Lego Movie, Godzilla vs Kong and the Lethal Weapon television series Dan Lin and Todd Makurath, producer of last year’s most awarded film, Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Organizer Kevin Lin, a tech nerd who, as a side effect of success, has developed a minimalist chic fashion sense, is famous as a cofounder of Twitch, the online streaming platform launched in 2011 that brings together a community of 100 million gamers each month and is the gaming scene’s most vibrant community. He’s also invested in over a hundred other startups and in recent years launched a gaming company in Taiwan called Metatheory.
“We really want to see what kind of energy we can get going here,” said Kevin Lin, speaking to me last Friday at Sundance Asia’s opening night party, which mixed a Hollywood crowd with Taiwan’s entertainment world. “This is really just exciting, and we think there’s a lot of value in these events for the way they bring people together.”
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival Asia
Sundance Asia was created in 2016 as a satellite event of Sundance, America’s most important indie film festival, which is held each January in Park City, Utah. Previous editions of the Asia event were held in Hong Kong and Jakarta. But once the event became available for a new host city, Lin and two other partners, Iris Wu and Jonathan Liao, snapped up the license with a three year deal, which potentially enables Sundance Asia to return to Taiwan for at least two more years. Sundance’s only other satellite event is held annually in London.
For event production, Lin, Wu and Liao created a purpose-built company called G2GO, naming it after the Chinese zodiac signs of the founders — chicken (ji), rabbit (tu) and dog (gou).
Film curation was handled by Sundance programmers, two of whom, Kim Yutani and Heidi Zwicker, traveled to Taipei last weekend. The three indie features screened in Taipei were all from Sundance’s 2023 program. They included two by Asian-American directors, Randall Park’s comedy on Asian-American hipsters, Shortcomings, and Justin Chon’s dark drama on an aspiring Indonesian rapper, Jamojaya. The third was American director Rachel Lambert’s love story for the socially awkward, Sometimes I Think About Dying.
Photo: David Frazier
Sundance Asia also involves a local competition for short films, with the winner invited to apply to competition at Sundance’s main US-based festival. Though this Taipei event allowed only a month for collecting films, it received around 250 submissions. The winner, Tuo Tuo (陀陀) by director An Chu (朱建安), received a NT$50,000 prize sponsored by Barco, the Belgian maker of high-end digital projectors.
‘ENGAGED FILM COMMUNITY’
“This has been an amazingly successful festival,” said Zwicker, a senior programmer at Sundance. “And what I really love is that Taiwan has such an engaged and eager film community. The Q&As were just fantastic.”
Photo: David Frazier
The entire Taiwan festival was organized in just three months and Yang, the Broadway actor, described the process as “chaos.”
“Basically, everybody just started calling up all our friends and telling them to get involved,” said Yang, who is friends with festival organizers but not officially part of the organizing team.
“The energy is coming back,” Yang said. “Everyone feels a moral obligation to bring their blessed superpower to this cause, if they have one.”
In addition to Sundance, several other international projects are now happening in Taipei. Luc Besson is currently shooting a new action thriller in Taipei and Yang is personally involved in a musical adaptation of Ang Lee’s film The Wedding Banquet, to be released in Taiwan next year. Fast and Furious director Justin Lin and Makurath are also laying the groundwork to open a company in Taiwan for film production targeted at the Asia region.
None of this new energy seems dissuaded by threats from China, which frequently applies diplomatic pressure to block Taiwan’s international participation. When asked if China would complain about a “Sundance Taiwan” event, Kevin Lin replied simply, “We’ll find out.”
He added that negotiations with Sundance actually spent quite a bit of time going through potential political complications.
“But in the end, the only question they really asked us was, ‘can we do LGBTQ stuff here?’”
“We’re not a political organization, we’re an artistic organization,” explained Zwicker. “For us, the main thing is that when we go to another country, we’re not going to compromise our values of free speech and inclusivity.”
INDUSTRY SUPPORT
Though China is so far not a problem, Hollywood stars said they hoped Taiwan’s film industry and government can come up to speed when it comes to practical industry support.
George Huang, who recently tried to shoot a car chase through Ximending for a new project, spoke of encountering a bureaucratic brick wall when he tried to get dates on his permit changed due to rain. Even a dinner with Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) didn’t help, he said.
Moreover, unlike Thailand and South Korea, Taiwan does not have “A-level” film crews capable of working with the Hollywood system. And while Taiwan’s various film commissions profess an eagerness to attract international projects, regulations and lack of professionalism still present major obstacles.
“The Taiwanese think they are international, but they’re really not,” said Eric Chen, a producer with Ma Studios working locally but raised in the US.
“Taiwan is very global, but very specific at the same time,” said Justin Lin, who grew up in Taipei’s Yonghe suburb until the age of eight. “I hope we can build something here, but we’ll see.”
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