During the past two years from 2020 to 2021, the pandemic of COVID-19 caused a series of crises to the entertainment industries including tourism, game, leisure, and cinema. These businesses used to play crucial roles in the conventional process of urban regeneration through attracting people to visit cities as a locale for various events and inciting business developments that facilitate the events taking places in the cities. However, due to the pandemic, most of these events have been postponed, suspended, and even cancelled, which challenged the established model of event-led urban regeneration. To survive under such severe situation, some film festivals, for instance, tried to continue the screenings by hybrid or online formats, which has been preliminary examined by several new published reports and articles with its limitations and opportunities.
In Taipei, because the government successfully contained the pandemic, only several film festivals got cancelled in 2020. Most of them were hold in person with different prevention policies. Therefore, more than presenting how film festivals in Taipei tried hard to survive under the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic like other cities did, this preliminary fieldnote focuses on the strategies applied by these film festivals that not only preserved on-site screenings but also transformed the limitations to be creative businesses. Through participatory observation and archive research (especially reviewing news reports and the festival-related online forums) particularly on the Taipei Film Festival, the Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival, and the Golden Horse Film Festival in 2020 and 2021, I argue that the novel strategies established by these festivals created some potentials to not only resume but also revitalize the model of event-led urban regeneration in the coming post-COVID era.
Mots clés : film festival|urban regeneration|COVID-19|new normal|creative industry
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