Due to the COVID-19 pan­demic, many events and conferences have had to go online. Following the good example, this year South Taiwan Film Festi­val collaborates with doc­umentary streaming plat­form Giloo to show all the participating films online. Although such a drastic change came as a response to the epidemic, for the festival, which celebrates its 20th anni­versary this year, it is also a new milestone in expanding the stage and stepping into the future. Are you read y to join? See you on Giloo from November 6th to 13th.

The South Taiwan Film Festival was initiated in 2001 by Professor Yu-shan Huang of the Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary & Film Archiving, Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA). She led the graduate students to organize and launch it in Kaohsiung as an independent film festival. In 2003 the festival moved to Tainan, which became the base for promoting the image arts of Southern Taiwan locally. The South Award was set up in the same year, solicit­ing submissions of Chinese-language films from around the world. The well-known documentary Let It Be was the winner in 2004. In order to encourage young directors, the New Directors section was set up to introduce the works and ideas of upcoming Taiwanese directors. This section has introduced directors such as Yu-Hsien Lin of Jump! Boys, Shu-Yu Lin of The Pain of Others, Wi Ding Ho of Respire, Yu-Chieh Cheng of Do Over, Singing Chen of God Man Dog, and Ko-Shang Shen of The Pigeon Game. The festival also featured Te-Sheng Wei before he shot to fame in 2008 with his film Cape No. 7.

"It's not that Tainan audiences don't watch movies; they just have relatively fewer resources," said Joe Huang, the current Art Director of the South Film Festival, speaking of the original intention of the festival in retrospect. With the words "South Taiwan in its name, the initiation of the festival indeed had to do with the fact that the image arts resources had long been concentrated in Taipei. Art films or works from the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and the Taipei Film Festival were rarely shown in Central and Southern Taiwan. The audience in these regions were not be able to watch them unless they visited Taipei. Later, it was discovered that some of the excellent foreign observatory films screened in Taipei were blockbusters when shown at the South Taiwan Film Festival. It was apparent that there is demand in Southern Taiwan. What was lacking was resources.

In 2008, the Multi-media Center of TNNUA handed the festival over to the South Taiwan Film Association. The organiza­tion work, however, is still run by the faculty, students and alumni of the TNNUA. Joe Huang was recruited by his seniors that year to witness the growth and transformation of the festival. In the early days, the festival solicited only Mandarin films and served as a platform for audience in Central and Southern Taiwan to watch the films. Later, it shifted to become a competitions for global Chinese filmmakers, expanding beyond Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, also inviting non-Man­darin speaking filmmakers to participate. Also, as there are gradually more film festivals or venue for art films in South­em Taiwan, whether official or private, such as Kaohsiung Film Festival, Shine Film Festival, and Wonderful Theatre, etc, the South Taiwan Film Festival has been rethought its positioning : it not only focuses on artistry, but also includes environmental, cultural, political and even human rights issues .

Some viewers might think that the film selection is becoming more difficult to understand and more intense. Rather than presenting films with commercial prospects, the festival focuses on promoting films of marginalized themes and filmmakers who lack resources, so as to offer more diversified viewing perspectives to the audience. The experimental film award added in 2014, for instance, aims at exploring image aesthetics. Sometimes the audience feels the films are 'incomprehensible', but really, they are just unfamiliar .

Twenty years is not a short time for a privately-run independent film festival. Lacking stable funding, the festival has always been trying and adjusting in a state of uncertainty. Even though it was almost suspended in 2016, the festival got through the crisis and grew ever stronger. In 2019, not only did the festival start to solicit its key visual design, it also changed the Citizen Image Competition to Focus on Tainan Short Film Competition. The Citizen TAINAN Award was officially added to the South Award prizes, encouraging the public to tell local stories of Tainan with images, building up Tainan's image database at the same time.

This year, in response to the pandemic, the South Taiwan Film Festival has changed to online screening. A total of 39 shortlisted films will be available on the Giloo documentary film platform for free viewing.

The festival also started a Podcast channel named 「南方甘咧捏？」．The post-screening talks will be live-streamed on the Facebook fan page. Going fully online marks a new starting point for the festival. The opening and closing films, however, will still be screened to a live audience. The Iranian film Gracefully will be screened at the Former Official Residence of the Mayor of Tainan on October 31st. Years of Macau from Macau is to be screened at Tainan Great South Gate on November 14th. They will be 20th birthday presents for the festival itself. Join in the celebra­tion!

Nov. 6th (Fri.) - Nov. 13th (Fri.)
Free streaming on Giloo documentary platform : https://giloo.ist/ Search for》南方甘啊捏？
• Spotify∣https://reurl.cc/pygkmQ
For more information, go to facebook 「南方影展South Taiwan Film Festival」or scan the QRCode