It's 'Oscar' time in Asia! : the rise and demise of the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, 1954-1972

On 17 December 2009, the 53rd Asia-Pacific Film Festival (APFF) was held, after a two-year hiatus, in Kaohsiung, the largest city in southern Taiwan. Taiwan's Ministry of Culture supported the festival to lend a hand to the southern region, where a typhoon had devastated the economy only a few months before, and to bring tourists back to this harbour city Celebrities such as Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, Chi-ling Lin, and John Woo attended the occasion and raised money for charity. To revive the event's faded standing, the festival committee invited Dieter Kosslick, director of the Berlin International Film Festival since 2001, to supervise the official competition section. However, despite the Taiwanese government's support, the 53rd gathering attracted much less attention from the outside world than its more scintillating competitors — the Busan International Film Festival and the Shanghai International Film Festival, which itself had eclipsed the Hong Kong International Film Festival, owner of the competitive edge in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the APFF's presence in the region has been diminishing since the 1980s and, in the new millennium, the festival carries little clout in Asia's thriving film culture and industry. Nevertheless, as the region's first international film organisation, APFF was for at least two decades the single most important annual cinema event in Asia. Its parent organisation, the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia-Pacific (FPA). played a vital role in invigorating the region's cinema network: co-producing films, exchanging stars, providing location shooting incentives, sharing the latest technical inv