Taiwan’s ambition to strengthen its global presence by exporting its cultural content abroad and boosting its production hub status is made apparent with the establishment of the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), which has launched various funding initiatives to back local projects’ international ventures.
Backed by a solid foundation of state-of-art technology, TAICCA’s collaboration with Venice Film Festival will not only be promoting Taiwan’s VR productions but also enhance the island’s status as a production hub, said deputy minister of culture Chun-Heng Peng, adding that the culture ministry and TAICCA have vowed to take Taiwan’s creative content forward through various funding and financing initiatives.
In March, TAICCA launched the first Immersive Content Grant for International Joint Ventures or Co-Productions to financially back original projects co-produced by companies established in Taiwan and internationally, but excluding those from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. Five international teams have been selected and each has been awarded a grant of $116,000 (NT$3.5 million), TAICCA said, and the agency will accompany each team for 18 months until they finish their projects.
Founded in June 2019, TAICCA is an independent agency set up under the Ministry of Culture and the cabinet (Executive Yuan) dedicated to the cultural content industries in Taiwan. It also manages the National Development Fund to develop intellectual property, incubate culture technologies and facilitate startups.
While boosting Taiwan’s virtual reality productions on the global stage such as Venice Film Festival has been a priority for the agency, it has also recently launched joint venture Screenworks Asia with the local streaming firm and film distributor Catchplay to ramp up original content productions from the island and export them to the world.
Taiwan is one of the world’s few places that is not hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic and its film and entertainment industries have been largely operating business as usual. Nevertheless, TAICCA still offers financial support to those who are in need of financial aid during the pandemic. A grant of up to $170,473 (NT$5 million) will be handed out to selected groups of cultural content creators.
From Nov. 18-20, TAICCA will stage Taiwan Creative Content Fest, which aims to explore the application of technological innovation in arts and entertainment and foster a trading market for cross-discipline creative content. TAICCA said a platform will be set up for VR content creators to introduce, pitch and sell their works to potential buyers and investors.