A group of Taiwanese and Taiwanese-Americans in the Los Angeles film industry are using a well-known indie film festival to build bridges with Taiwan.
David Fraser / Contributing Writer
When the Sundance Asian Film Festival came to Taipei for the first time last year, attracting an unprecedented number of Hollywood A-listers, “there were more parties than screenings,” said Iris Wu, a Los Angeles-based Taiwanese tech entrepreneur and one of the festival's three main organizers.
While August's event was planned in just three months and featured just five films, this year's program has more than doubled in size, with a slate of Hollywood talent on tap when Sundance Asia returns to Taipei next week for a run from August 21-25 at the flagship venues Huashan 1912 Cultural Park and Sintrend Creative Park.
The event's biggest draw is again the stars of California cinema, including Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor, Westworld showrunner Lisa Joy, Joker cinematographer Lawrence Sher, Gravity sound mixer Skip Lievsay, Japanese star animator Tezuka Masato, Guardians of the Galaxy screenwriter Nicole Perlman and Taiwanese-American Patrick Lee, co-founder of film rating website Rottentomatoes.com.
Photo: David Frazier
And the party
At the festival's opening, these VIP guests make their way first to a red-carpet media spectacle outside Taipei's SPOT Cinema, then most of them head straight to Legacy, a warehouse-sized music venue next door, during a screening of the opening film, “Brothers,” by Taiwanese-American director Shawn Wang, which won both the jury and audience awards for best fiction film at Sundance earlier this year. “Then the party begins,” Wu says.
Such a spectacular opening will mark a marked departure from standard practice in Taiwanese cinema, where parties are largely incidental to major events like the Golden Horse, Taipei and Kaohsiung Film Festivals, with little emphasis on networking events, industry meet-ups or international VIPs.
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival: Asia
“In this industry, talking to people is really the purpose of these events,” Wu says, “and if you've been to other film festivals like Cannes or Sundance, you'll know that the parties are just a gathering of amazing people from all over the world.”
Festivals, which host industry events and serve as venues for top film talent, have become particularly important since the pandemic, which has sparked the rise of streaming platforms and international co-productions.
“Everyone is thinking not just about their own immediate community, but 'how do we connect with resources in other countries?'” Wu said.
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival: Asia
She added that Taiwan “lacks this atmosphere.”
Satellite Events
Sundance Asia was founded in 2016 as a satellite event to Sundance, America's premier indie film festival, founded by Robert Redford in 1978 and held every January in Park City, Utah. Sundance currently only has one satellite event, in London.
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival: Asia
The event, which began as Sundance Hong Kong in 2014, changed its name to Sundance Asia in 2016 and was held in Hong Kong until 2019. However, the Hong Kong event was suspended due to COVID-19 and China's crackdown on democratic freedoms. In 2022, the festival moved to Jakarta.
Taipei's chance to host Sundance Asia came suddenly early last year when an event license unexpectedly became available. Kevin Lin, a Taiwanese-American founder of the popular livestreaming app Twitch, won the license and brought on Wu and Jonathan Liao, co-founder of Taipei co-working space Futureward, as event partners.
Capitalizing on Lin's Silicon Valley connections and Wu's in Los Angeles, the team further tapped a group of Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American stars who wanted to “build bridges” with Taiwan, as Lin put it in an interview with Focus Taiwan last year. At last year's festival, these stars included Fast & Furious director Justin Lin, Lego Movie producer Dan Lin, Hollywood director George Huang, and Taiwanese-American actress Janet Hsieh.
Photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival: Asia
Wu invited most of these celebrities.
“I just said to them, let's go have beef noodles together, and they said, 'Yeah, let's go,'” she said.
“Trick your brain”
Born and raised in Taipei, Wu has made it big in Hollywood in just a decade. After studying biotechnology at Taipei Medical University, she switched gears to focus on music technology at New York University. Shortly after graduating in the US, Wu began developing technology to recreate full, immersive cinematic sound with just two speakers, by exploiting the way the brain measures sound at different distances, “tricking the brain,” as she describes it. This software-driven technology became the flagship product of Ambidio, the company she founded in 2014.
With applications for everything from home theaters to smartphones, Wu's technology found an early believer in George Lucas's Skywalker Sound, which introduced her to Disney, which signed on as an early investor. Ambidio now works with several Hollywood studios, including blue-chip names like Netflix and HBO.
Wu and Lin first met a few years ago in Taipei, when they were both invited to speak on the same panel at Computex, Taiwan's largest electronics trade show. After that first meeting, the two “became drinking buddies, and then one night last year, he called me at about 2 a.m.”
It was unusual for Lin to call so late, and Wu had just come home from a party, “so I was really, really drunk.”
When Wu answered the phone, Lin asked her, “Have you ever heard of Sundance? Is it a big company?”
“And I thought, 'Yeah, Sundance is pretty big,'” Wu said.
“Then Kevin asked me, 'How is the Sundance Film Festival in Taiwan?'”
“I said, 'Sure, let's do Sundance in Taiwan.' And he said, 'Sure, I'll call you back tomorrow.'”
At Sundance Asia, Wu programs panels and other events using her own business card holder, while Sundance's in-house programmers select films from a wish list she gives them. Lin, whom Wu describes as the “whole mind,” functions as a sort of CEO in charge of partnerships, fundraising and sponsorship, she says. And Taipei-based Jonathan Lin is “the only rational person on the team” and in charge of producing the event locally.
This year's film lineup includes 10 feature films from Sundance's core US film festival, as well as two short films and a local short film award. Along with critically acclaimed opener “Didi,” a coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American living in California, the films address stories and themes from around the world. British-made “Kneecap,” about a Belfast rap duo driving Irish language revival, has been a big hit on the festival circuit all year. Documentaries include “Porcelain War,” about an artist turned soldier in Ukraine, and “Another Kind of Wilderness,” about a Norwegian family living off the grid as they reintegrate into modern society.
The visiting Hollywood stars will interact with audiences and the local industry through eight master panels, five workshops, a screenwriting intensive at the Sundance Institute and more events to be announced.
The visiting masters are involved in the filmmaking process “from pre-production to post-production,” Wu said, rattling off a laundry list of directors, producers, Marvel character designers, sound engineers, cinematographers, screenwriters and others who have worked on blockbuster films.
“Everyone in the pipeline is going to be noticed,” she said.
But the real secret of Sundance Asia in Taipei is the direct interaction between the local and international creative communities.
“Everyone gets to party and sing karaoke together. It's a rare opportunity,” Wu said. “Taiwanese film industry people don't often have the chance to talk to top Hollywood stars. We're trying to change that.”
Comments are moderated. Please keep your comments relevant to the article. Comments containing insults, obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be deleted and users will be banned. The final decision is at the discretion of Taipei Times.
