Red Sea Film Festival; Taiwan’s Funding & Global Production Hub Status: Part Two

As promised, this edition of Streamlined concludes a two-part deep dive into Taiwan, looking at series production; reasons behind the soft power push; and what Taiwan is wisely not doing as it positions itself as a global production hub. The first part focused on co-production funding for features.

I’ve just returned from Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and will talk more about the festival’s funding activities in the next edition of Streamlined. This week, I’m only going to mention the presence of a large number of Hollywood stars at the festival, which was honestly quite jarring given that the death toll in Palestine and Israel is approaching 20,000.

But it also raised questions (for me anyway) about the future value of Hollywood talent. Coming out of the SAG-AFTRA strike, these actors must be starved of cash and exposure and badly needed the fees and flashbulbs provided by the festival (irony alert). But what surprised me is how packed the masterclasses were for talent including Nicolas Cage, Gwyneth Paltrow, Adrien Brody, Halle Berry and Andrew Garfield, especially as some have not made a film in years.

At the risk of sounding churlish, for somebody based in East Asia, the presence of so much Hollywood bling actually felt oddly old-fashioned. As one self-confessed Gen Z actor said in a session I moderated (a question from the floor), the kids these days are consuming a lot of cross-cultural content on TikTok and are no longer hugely impressed by ageing Hollywood glitterati. For that audience, BTS or Thai star Bright Vachirawit (18m million followers on Insta) would be a bigger draw.