Structures and Stakeholders
Unlike most Taiwanese film festivals, the Golden Harvest Awards enjoy secure funding and regular administration by staff members, even though the size of the budget varies year by year. The Awards were originally financed by the GIO and are now financed by the Ministry of Culture since the GIO was abolished in 2012. The administration has been the responsibility of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive (CTFA), an institution tasked with collecting, restoring, preserving and researching Taiwan’s film cultural heritage, including that of the Republican era. CTFA is an independent organization, but is financially supported by the government. Dr. Lin Wen-chi, director of the CTFA, told me in an interview that he anticipated enhancing the role of the Golden Harvest Awards from simply a film competition and exhibition event to a more proactive player in Taiwan’s film education and film industry. However, this can only happen once the CTFA is upgraded to the National Film Centre by 2016 as planned by the Ministry of Culture.41 While Dr. Lin’s vision should not be treated as a confirmed policy statement, it nevertheless illuminates how the principle stakeholders wish to use the Golden Harvest Awards as a facilitator in
Taiwan’s film education and film industry, with a major input in the shaping of the island’s larger film culture.
According to my interviewees, the overall structure of the Golden Harvest Awards has maintained continuity because their purpose has always remained the same—cultivating local talent and encouraging early- career filmmakers.42 However, changes in certain practices are noteworthy as they may reflect the gradual transformation of Taiwan’s film industry and the larger international environment in which Taiwan is situated. For example, Dr. Lin revealed that the total budget for the Awards was NTD 8 million (c. US$250,000) in 2010; it dropped to NTD 7.73 million (c. US$264,000) in 2011 and NTD 6.90 million (c. US$231,700) in 2012, but then jumped to NTD 10 million (c. US$335,800) in 2013. I suggest that the sudden increase in budget may be explained by two inter-related factors: The newly created Ministry of Culture indicates that the Taiwan government, alongside the Chinese government, has begun to see “culture” as a valuable resource to demonstrate a country’s “soft power”;43 and cinema is considered a viable asset within Taiwan’s soft power strat- egy.44 Therefore, the Ministry of Culture is not only devoting a relatively healthy budget to the Golden Harvest Awards, but also initiating a series of new Spotlight Taiwan programs, which often include a film festival-like event to showcase Taiwanese cinema abroad.45 I shall return to this point for further discussion later.
The competition for the Golden Harvest Awards normally begins in September. Meanwhile, the CTFA appoints seven external experts to form a jury, all of whom are involved in the creative industries in Taiwan. To use the 2013 Golden Harvest Awards as an example, each of the seven jury members were drawn from animation, television, arts, advertising, documentary, popular music or commercial filmmaking, and three also teach in universities. When the jury meets for the first time, they decide among themselves what the fundamental criteria for that particular year should be. In this way, film professionals and film educators become the second set of stakeholders of the Golden Harvest Awards, as the independent jury is empowered to steer the direction of what an award-winning film should look like. Once the CTFA has collected all the submissions in November, the jury has over a month to watch them in private and agree collectively on a short list in mid-January, which is announced through a press release prepared by the CTFA. Thus, the journalists and press agents can be considered the third set of stakeholders, but their role seems more passive and marginal in the case of the Golden Harvest Awards. Upon close examination, the publicity and publications around the Awards rely heavily on several outside forces, including the CTFA as the organizer of the Awards and the editor of a prominent film journal in Taiwan, The Film Appreciation Journal, as well as the film scholars and film critics who are film festival insiders.
In the 1990s, the technological and financial threshold to enter the Golden Harvest Awards was rather high for ordinary students, and as a result, the number of submissions was normally between 30 and 40.46 Therefore, the award ceremonies of the 1990s were dominated by established filmmakers and film students from overseas (especially from the USA) who held a valid passport of the ROC.47 Moreover, the exhibition of the award-winning productions remained a specialized event for the Awards participants throughout the 1990s.
Since the Golden Harvest Awards began accepting all audiovisual materials in the late 2000s, the number of submissions increased to a couple of hundred each year. Moreover, it was stipulated that in order to ensure a level playing field for new talent, the CTFA would no longer accept submission from filmmakers who had already won twice in the Golden Harvest Awards, or who had enjoyed commercial release of a feature film (drama or documentary). Despite structural continuity, these minor changes have made the Golden Harvest Awards very different in the twenty-first century. Although the focus of the Awards has always been on short films, the submissions in the 1990s were generally much shorter (less than 30 minutes) than today (close to 60 minutes). This may be explained by a reduction in the cost of filmmaking. Second, the number of student entrants, especially from within local colleges and universities, has risen sharply. Moreover, the number of prizes has also increased correspondingly. According to Shen Ko-shang, this has made the Golden Harvest Awards today look much more like a student affair than in the 1990s. Finally, in 2013, an overwhelming number of submissions poured into the drama category, while the documentary, experimental films and animation submissions dwindled. Wang Shao-hua, director of the Programming Department of the CTFA, speculated that this change is due to the revival of the domestic commercial film market, combined with increasing opportunities for cross-strait and pan-Asian co-productions. In particular, Wang pointed out that since the Taiwan International Animation Film Festival closed in 2008, output of animation reduced, as many local talents turned their attention to animation film festivals and markets in mainland China instead. In other words, from the perspective of encouraging film diversity, innovation, and creativity, the lure of the market may present a different set of challenges for the organizers of the Golden Harvest Awards.
In recent years, the CTFA further enhanced its role as a local mediator between the film education and industry sectors by expanding Golden Harvest Awards-related events, including seminars, workshops, and the exhibition tour of award-winning films. Between the announcement of the short list in January and the revelation of the final winners in March, the CTFA organizes a series of master classes, normally between four and six events, targeted at the nominees. The purpose is to help the nominees gain further insight into opportunities in the film industry. To ensure quality, the selected speakers are mostly experienced filmmakers, scriptwriters, and producers in or outside Taiwan, some of whom may also be past winners of the Golden Harvest Awards.48 In this way, the filmmakers and film professionals become important stakeholders in the Awards.
The final meeting of the jury takes place in early March. Previous judges of the Golden Harvest Awards often depict it as a battle between the willpower and stamina of individual jury members. Once the jury reaches a consensus on all official winners, each member may also nominate a special prize to encourage an individual outstanding performance or achieve- ment.49 As soon as the jury has made its decisions, the CTFA announces the results to the press. The jury is dissolved, and the award-winning filmmakers and films tour the island, mostly in schools, colleges, and universities, but sometimes in libraries, arts centers and museums. It is customary to arrange a short discussion with the filmmaker(s) or an expert of some sort after the screening. It is at this stage that the participating organizations for screenings and the audiences also become stakeholders of the Golden Harvest Awards.
By looking at the venues, we can deduce that the Golden Harvest Awards target a specific audience of viewers instead of a mass audience, despite the changes in regulations and the expansion of festival activities by the CTFA since the late 2000s. For this reason, perhaps the virtue of the Golden Harvest Awards should still be understood as their long-term cultivation of film culture in Taiwan and not necessarily as a short-term measure to plug holes in the local film industry. As cinema is increasingly viewed and managed as a branch of creative industry in many countries including Taiwan, recent film scholarship has expanded to focus on the political economy of production, marketing strategies, distribution and exhibition. However, as the history of the Golden Harvest Awards has demonstrated, filmmakers and their films remain the most fundamental elements of a national cinema, while an audience with a diverse taste in cinema is also crucial in sustaining a vibrant film economy.
