More than a dozen feature-length and short films selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival are being screened at the festival’s Asian edition, which opened in Taipei yesterday.
The event, which runs through Sunday, is to feature 14 panel discussions and workshops, with people who have worked on Hollywood blockbusters expected to share their experiences and engage with local filmmakers in Taiwan.
At a news conference in Taipei on Tuesday, Taiwanese-American entrepreneur Kevin Lin (林士斌), one of the founders of G2Go Entertainment, described the Sundance Film Festival Asia in Taipei — an extension of the US’ largest independent film festival — as an “independent film celebration.”
Photo: CNA
Lin, who is best known for cofounding the livestreaming service Twitch, created G2Go Entertainment with friends to organize the film event in Taiwan.
Sundance director of programming Kim Yutani said the event would enable audiences to “discover their voices, entertain the stories and take part in conversations.”
The Sundance Institute — a nonprofit organization established by Hollywood star Robert Redford to organize the annual film festival in Park City, Utah — was dedicated to supporting independent storytellers and showing their work to audiences worldwide.
Yutani, who would also be one of the panelists, added that she is “thrilled to be engaged with local audiences [and] the film community here on the ground.”
Also joining the panels are Alan Taylor, director of Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, and Lawrence Sher, nominated for an Academy Award in cinematography for Joker, the organizer said.
Ten feature films and five short films selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival would be shown at SPOT-Huashan Cinema in Taipei over the next five days, including Taiwanese-American director Sean Wang’s (王湘聖) debut feature movie Didi (弟弟).
Didi, which won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble and the Audience Award: US Dramatic at the main festival in January, is a coming-of-age drama about an angsty teenager from an immigrant family trying to navigate increasingly tense family and interpersonal relationships.
A New Kind of Wilderness and Porcelain War, which won World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary and US Grand Jury Prize: Documentary respectively, would also be screened at the Taipei event.
A New Kind of Wilderness documents a family living in on a farm in a forest who are forced to make significant changes to their life following a tragic event, while Porcelain War documents three Ukrainian artists striving to preserve their culture while defending their homeland against a brutal invasion by Russia.
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