Documentaries shine at Taipei Film Festival Stephen Cremin in Taipei

The 7th Taipei Film Festival concluded today (July 9) with an awards ceremony weighted towards local documentary features.

The 15-day event opened on 25 June with a new cut of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times, with three lines of dialogue excised from the version that competed at Cannes. The only other Taiwanese narrative feature to receive its domestic premiere was Wang Ming-tai's Fall...In Love.

The festival has three competitive sections: the Taipei Grand Award for local cinema, the Taipei Image Award for DV shorts shot by non-professional citizens of the city, and the New Talent Competition, an award introduced this year for narrative features by first- or second-time directors of any nationality.



The festival's main prize, the $30,000 Taipei Grand Award, went to Yen Lan-chun and Cres Juang's Let It Be, a documentary about the daily lives of three elderly rice farmers in Tainan County. The film, which also won the Media’s Choice Award, had previously shared the top prize for local documentaries at the 2004 Taiwan International Documentary Festival.
The Taipei Grand Award Audience's Choice prize went to another documentary, Lin Yu-hsien's Jump! Boys. Lin's film focuses on a group of young boy gymnasts and their coach as they train to compete for a national competition in the southern city of Kaohsiung. Jump! Boys also received a Special Mention from the jury.

Both Let It Be and Jump! Boys received their theatrical release before the festival. The former has grossed $125,000 to date in Taipei; the latter completed its run just before the start of the festival, grossing $75,000 in the capital. Among local releases this year, only Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud has taken more at the box office.

With a pan-Chinese jury composed of directors Wang Tung, Clara Law, Fruit Chan, Lin Cheng-sheng and Jia Zhangke, the Grand Prize of the New Talent Competition - announced mid-festival - appropriately went to a Russian feature, Marina Razbezhkina's absurdist family drama Harvest Time.

This year's festival had a special focus on the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, including a season of new Russian cinema, a retrospective of Lensfilm Studio and a closing gala of Timur Bekmambetov's fantasy-horror Night Watch.
Ticket sales at the Taipei Film Festival crossed US$200,000 for the first time, bolstering the $530,000 budget the festival receives from Taipei City Government, making the event a serious contender to Golden Horse as the city's pre-eminent film festival.

2005 TAIPEI FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS IN FULL

NEW TALENT COMPETITION
Grand Prize: Harvest Time (dir. Marina Razbezhkina)
Special Jury Prize: Changing Destiny (dir. Daniele Gaglianone)
Special Mention: In My Father's Den (dir. Brad McGann)
Audience's Choice Award: Off Beat (dir. Hendrik Holzemann)
TAIPEI GRAND AWARD
Grand Prize: The Last Rice Farmer (dir. Yen Lan-chun & Cres Juang)
Audience's Choice Award: Jump! Boys (dir: Lin Yu-hsien)
Media’s Choice Award: The Last Rice Farmer (dir. Yen Lan-chun & Cres Juang)
Best Narrative Film: The Wayward Cloud (dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
Best Documentary: Biographies of the Macaques (dir: Ke Chin-yuan)
Best Animation: The Man of the Hour (dir. Chen Kang-wei)
Special Mentions:
　　　Go Out to Sea (dir. Chou I-wen)
　　　Plan of Regeneration (dir. Wang Hsiu-ling & Lo Shin-chieh)
　　　Small & Deep, Love Stories (dir. Pan Hsin-ping)
　　　Grandpa's Mountain Ballad (dir. Chen Po-wen)
　　　Jump! Boys (dir: Lin Yu-hsien)

TAIPEI IMAGE AWARD
Grand Prize: The Dumping River (dir. Weng Ching-ting)
Second Prize: A Love Letter (dir. Chu Po-ying)
Third Prize: Happy New Year (dir. Wang Cheng-yang)
Audience's Choice Award: Nice Dream (dir. Emma Chou)