Golden Harvest Awards in Taiwan

Speaker: Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley

Abstract

This paper answers two research questions: (1) how does Taiwan’s Golden Harvest Award (jin sui jiang) translate the western-derived concept and practice of the “film festival” into its cultural environments? (2) How does the Golden Harvest Award translate Chinese and Taiwanese cultures to the outside world? The paper first offers an overview of the Golden Harvest Award in order to understand its structures and components. It then examines the negotiation and power interplay between different stakeholders and how the Award has facilitated the development of Taiwan’s film industry by translating specific elements of western-inspired film knowledge and practices to the local cultural milieu. Furthermore, by exploring the current identity crisis from which the Golden Harvest Award suffers, the discussion foregrounds the rapidly changing landscape of Taiwan’s film environment, especially the sudden proliferation of Taiwan-related film festivals on and outside the island. This identity crisis reveals the anxieties of Taiwan’s cultural agents about the perceived imbalanced translation process from the “local” to the “international” and their deep sense of frustration and uncertainty about how to address these issues.

Speaker's Bio

Dr Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Associate, Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS and Associate Fellow, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham. She is also the Secretary-General of EATS (2012–present) and Editor of EATS News.

Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: bc18@soas.ac.uk