9/29/24 Virtual Meeting
10/26/24 In-Person Session and Performance
Taipei, Taiwan
Women Make Waves International Film Festival
Established in 1993, Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival, Taiwan has been one of the major film festivals in Taiwan and has established itself as the biggest one dedicated to supporting female talents. It is also the longest running and largest issue-oriented film festival in Taiwan. Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival aims to celebrate the achievements of outstanding female talents, to explore different aspects of female experiences, feminism, and beyond, and to promote equality and rights of all genders. By covering a wide range of genres, issues, and representations of gender, WMWIFF seeks to promote great cinematic arts by female talents and to advocate gender equality through films with feminist consciousness and various subjects.
In 1993, the inaugural Women Make Waves, jointly organized by the Awakening Foundation and B&W Film Studio, was the predecessor of Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival Taiwan. In 2000, Women Make Waves was renamed as Women Make Waves Film/Video Festival. This marked the first time the film festival hosted screenings at the cinema. The film festival expanded significantly, solidifying itself as one of the major cultural events. In 2012, the film festival was officially renamed as Women Make Waves Int’l Film Festival Taiwan.
In 1998, as the film festival entered its 5th edition, gender studies and discourses had become prominent in Taiwan. To ensure the prospect of the film festival, Taipei Women’s Film Association was founded in September of the same year. HUANG Yu-Shan served as the first chairwoman of the Association. In 2001, the film festival established the model of nation-wide film tours, marking one of the first film festivals to do so in Taiwan. It has jointly held screenings with local theaters, organizations, universities, educational institutions, and cultural venues, in order to reduce rural-urban differences and promote gender equity through films beyond Taipei.
The Body in Space——An Interactive Workshop
In this fast-paced, exhilarating, collaborative and interactive workshop, experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs will guide her participants through her own evolution as a filmmaker, her own conception a “somatic cinema,” and work as a group to create our own live film performance, which will be presented to the public on 10/26.
Words from Lynne…
In filmmaking, we are always negotiating the photographing of images that contain the body. We bring experiential, political or aesthetic contingencies to both the making and viewing of a cinema that contains the human form. If a body is different from our own – in terms of gender, skin color, or age – perhaps we frame it differently without even realizing it. We all know that looking at a body on screen affects us emotionally, psychologically and physically? When we speak of “space,” we must consider three dimensional issues of the here and now as well as more speculative conditions that arrive when we contemplate the future.
