【Art & Culture on Thursdays】2014 Youth Future Film Festival: Witnessing the Past and the Future

Text by the MOOK Scenic Spots Travel & Lifestyle Network Editorial Team

 

Where to go in the sweltering summer? Besides eating ice cream, shopping, or staying in an air-conditioned room, you can head to an art museum to watch movies. Young directors from around the world, who are just beginning to make their mark, have carefully selected and packaged their most representative and promising short films, presenting them to you.The 【2014 Youth Future Film Festival】 is an international short film festival organized, curated, and planned by youth groups.The 【2014 Youth Future Film Festival】 conveys an aesthetic spirit of diversity, vitality, locality, self-exploration, and social concern. "These are the issues we truly care about, a film festival that truly belongs to the new generation," said curator Lin Wei-lun confidently.

Using film to change the world, the festival becomes a platform for spreading ideas. "Future Film Day" is a cultural event initiated by several young designers and artists. Under the name "Lives out of life / Life beyond life," the team brings beautiful imagery into everyday life, having organized dozens of film festival events across northern, central, southern, and eastern Taiwan. The festival collaborates with many local shops, including cafes, art galleries, barbershops, live music venues, classrooms, and basements, allowing the public to easily, casually, and comfortably sit down to watch films.Each short film is no longer than thirty minutes, yet within a short span, it offers a glimpse into different perspectives and cultures around the world. At the same time, it actively promotes outstanding Taiwanese works internationally. Countless talented Taiwanese directors have ventured into international collaborations thanks to the "Future Film Day" initiative.

The "Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art" (MOCA) has, since 2010, created a youth film festival rooted in the experience of using art to intervene in space, themed around "youth." Based on the experimental creative showroom in the underground book street of Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station, this event has successfully built a new platform for Taiwan’s independent filmmakers and animation industry—closer to daily life, younger, and more socially engaged.

This year marks the fifth edition of the Contemporary Youth Film Festival, co-planned with the "Future Film Day" team as the 【2014 Youth Future Film Festival】. Time is the fairest resource bestowed upon us. From the perspective of the absolute self, it discusses the linear continuation of the past, present, and future. Some describe time as an endless river flowing from ancient times to the present. From the perspective of the relative other-self, relationships such as juniors, peers, and seniors; children, fathers, and grandfathers—all reveal that through understanding, communication, and imagination, time might be more like a cycle. A line from Mayday’s song “Dry” goes: “Now is that future, that world.” Imagine when the imagined future finally arrives, will we be ready to embrace it?Looking forward to the future is actually a practice of facing oneself, strengthening the exploration and reflection of the meaning of "now" and "the present" in our existence. "The past" shapes "the present," and "the present" creates "the future." That glimmer in the eyes of those who talk passionately about the future is "youth."

 

(Image source / Future Film Day in Taiwan)