Benson Wu Interview: Turn 24 hours into 48

In the first interview of my Beneath the Frame series, I got the chance to sit down and talk to Benson Wu who is the director of the Taiwan Film Festival in Australia (TWFF). A fantastic festival that screens across six different cities, focusing on emerging Taiwanese film. Benson was generous enough to go into detail about how a festival is run, giving a lot of much needed insight into what it takes to run a festival like this and how hard it is to work in the film festival business. It was truly a pleasure to speak to such an intelligent and driven person who is giving us all an opportunity every year to see wonderful films that we may not otherwise get the chance to see. – Billy Newbery

Part One

Billy Newbery: Hello, it’s nice to meet you Benson. Thank you for doing this and for being the first interview of this series.

Benson Wu:
Thank you for having me.

Billy:
I want to start at the beginning. Could you introduce the Taiwan Film Festival in Australia and how it started?

Benson:
The Taiwan Film Festival in Australia started in 2018. It’s heading into the 8^th edition in 2025, it feels like time goes by pretty quick. I realised there aren’t many Asian films getting played in Sydney. Back then I was an intern working for Queer Screen Mardi Gras Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival. I love [those festivals], don’t get me wrong, but I just found that the programmes are more focused towards European or American films. I found that a bit disappointing and in 2018 there was a big film in Taiwan that came out, which did really well internationally but it didn’t get a lot of attention in Australia. That’s when I was like, okay, I’m going to give it a try to see if people want to come because I think these are pretty good films. That’s how it started. One of the main things I really want to achieve, which still hasn’t [happened], is to create job opportunities. After graduating from film and arts, it’s really hard to get into the film or film festival industry, it’s so small. It’s really hard to squeeze into that door. With the Taiwan Film Festival, I always aim to have more interns or contracted staff to give international students or people of colour, people with different backgrounds opportunities to get into this industry.

Billy:
That’s fantastic. What was that big Taiwanese film that made you want to start the festival?

Benson:
It was The Great Buddha+, which actually did get selected at the Sydney Film Festival. Another big film during that time was The Bold, the Corrupted and the Beautiful. It’s a very typical Asian drama, with a very complex storyline. When I watched it, I could see why it didn’t get selected into more Western Culture Film Festivals. I think that dialogue and the cultural references can be a challenge, but it’s still a really beautiful film. That’s why I was like, okay, I’ve got to give it a shot.

Billy:
How long does it take to plan one of these festivals and where do you begin when you start planning?

Benson:
Pretty long, literally I’m starting to plan for next year already. We usually start in November when we book in the new venue and the dates for next year. By December we are usually starting the early stages of programming, and call for entries. Usually by January, February, that’s when we have to do a lot of government funding or sponsorship conversations. It takes a long, long time, ten to eight months I would say.

Billy:
Do you have a dedicated team that stays on that whole time?

Benson:
No, that would be great. We have three stages, so the programmers start now (December) until maybe March-ish, and then there’s another batch of interns which usually start in February and go to June, they do a lot of administration and preparation. Then another group of contractors will be [brought on] during the festival. Everyone is pretty much finished the minute the festival ends, so it leaves me doing a lot of clean-up.

Billy:
Do you get the same people every time?

Benson:
We try to, those ones that are able to stay in Sydney or they’re allowed to stay in Australia, we tend to renew their contract if they’re interested. Unfortunately, a lot of volunteers, though, are international students or on working holidays. So that area does shift quite regularly every year. We can’t afford full time. Everyone in this festival particularly, all have other full-time jobs, so we usually start working on the film festival stuff after they finish their day job. The meetings are always at 10:00 PM or 1:00 AM. It is pretty crazy but I think it sort of works with Taiwanese culture in a way. We don’t go to bed that early in Taiwan, we live a night market lifestyle.

Billy:
That sounds like it is a lot of work just to get it off the ground. With that kind of workload, how do you go about approaching all your tasks? I know you have brochures and handouts for the festival. When does that start getting written and when do all those print elements get put together?

Benson:
It depends when we lock in the programme. We usually have locked it in let’s say 70% around May. Everything can be written during that time. If we locked in a film right now, we actually would start working on the synopsis and everything ready just so we don’t cluster all the workload in May and June. I would say early June is when we have to finalise all the texts, so the designer can put everything into the programme guide and then it can be proofread. That proofread takes about a week and then goes to print. The printing process is super quick. I mean we printed out 10,000 copies, it takes less than a week to get it done. Then we go on sale at the end of June, a week after the Sydney Film Festival.

Billy:
Are all the synopsis and write ups down by one person or is it shared between multiple people?

Benson:
It really depends. When we first started it was mainly me and someone to proofread or rewrite what I wrote, but now we have started getting a lot more attention on our festival. They actually will submit their application, when we call out for volunteers, and they’ll say, “oh, I’m a good writer”. I just tend to use the same group of people to write the synopsis for the festival.

Billy:
Do you ever get people from other festivals come to yours or people go from yours to other festivals?

Benson:
Yes, a lot. One of my friends works for SFF, he does marketing there, so I do get him to do a lot of cross promotion for us. We do have a lot of team members finish our festival and then they go back to their country, where they’re still working on different local festivals over there. I think this experience hopefully helps them to get another job opportunity overseas. We do have a lot of overseas people who try to application, we do accept them because we everything online.

Billy:
It sounds like you also take on people who may not have done it before, who’ve only just done their Bachelor but haven’t actually worked in industry before, is that right?

Benson:
Yes, the majority of the team often are new graduates or students, I think those are the people that we are aiming for as well. To give them a work experience that’s very different from this corporate (world). When they work for the Taiwan Film Festival, I want that experience to really be quite different than how they expect.

Billy:
I want to diverge a little and ask about how you go about getting these cinema chains like Event or Village to screen the festival.

Benson:
It’s usually not too hard, I mean to be honest because I’m not fighting with other festivals for the venue space like I might be at say the Ritz Cinema or Dendy Cinema [here in Sydney] where it is packed with festivals so it might be hard for me to squeeze in. All of the cinemas we go to they’re really welcoming to us just because it’s something they don’t have or haven’t had for a long time.

Billy:
I love that, you can’t just wait around for them, you gotta go do it. I want to ask, if you’re happy answering, how much does a festival actually cost? How much do you practically need to get to make it happen?

Benson:
A lot, but it really depends on the size of the team, the festival, and the number of films being programmed. To run a small but healthy festival, I’d say you need at least $100K to cover essential costs like advertising and paying a few staff members. However, the budget can vary significantly, as each festival operates differently in terms of finances.

Billy:
Then getting those sponsorships are very important.

Benson:
Oh yeah. I would say a lot of the festivals, other than the biggest ones SFF or Mardi Gras, a lot of them probably don’t have full-time staff, I would say they just pay themselves two or three months and the rest of the time they really just work for free and out of passion. It’s something I’m trying to hopefully change in the culture. I know a lot of interns who often finish with the festival and gave up and then went into a different industry. I see this happen to so many people. When I finished my uni, I was in that situation as well. With TWFF interns, I often try to give them at least a contract job next year to keep a healthier cycle. But then it gets to the point when I’m just like, I’m not paying you enough and this is not healthy as well, so what do I do? I don’t know, it is tough. Arts is tough. I think some more experienced freelancers who work in festivals, they jump around festivals to fill the gaps in the year. Can you imagine someone who would just graduate trying to get into this, it’s really tough.

Billy:
As you said, they stay for a while, once you’re in there you’re not going just give it up.

Benson:
Exactly.

Billy: Alright so once you get the money and you get all the team, you’ve put so much work into it already, how do you get people to actually come and see the films?

Benson:
Marketing! It’s always bloody marketing. That’s something we constantly question ourselves when we do programming. Programming is such a biased thing. Some people who just like commercial films, some people who just really love arthouse films. It’s hard to find a balance. We’re trying with the Taiwan Film Festival in particular to build the audience’s habits and interests in the long run. I know generally most Asian audiences are more into commercial film, less art house. A lot of local cinephiles in Sydney, they’re familiar with Edward Yang and Hou Hsio-Hsien, but often they are not too familiar with the new emerging arthouse cinema from Taiwan. With our programming we always try to do everything that we can to build your taste and knowledge in Taiwanese cinema. In the long run people will just get more familiar with it. It’s very ambitious. I don’t know if it will work.

Every time we programme we always try to do something different. The year before we were trying to promote international co-productions, so there were a lot of experimental films, nonlinear narratives and timelines. This year’s programme was maybe slightly more mainstream, with a lot of action comedy films. So next year we want to try to do something that’s different from those styles that we already presented, to find something that will refresh the audience but still be familiar to what Taiwanese cinema identity is.

Billy:
How do you choose the themes? Is it all based on that goal of piecemealing and building that idea for the audience of what Taiwanese cinema can be and what it is now? Or is there something different every time that you come to the table?

Benson:
We try to do something different every time. During the process of programming we’ll come up with some different ideas but a lot of the time for this festival particularly because we exclusively only chose Taiwanese films for the programme there aren’t really always too many stylistically diverse films that could really make it more colourful. It is not like  SFF or SXSW Sydney, which is a lot more fun when programming. In a way TWFF is very restricted, we try to break that restriction but while still staying in that restricted zone, it’s a bit tricky.

Billy:
It sounds like the films that you get will dictate what theme it is for the year.

Benson:
Yeah, a hundred percent.

Part Two

In the second part of the conversation with Benson Wu we went into just how the Taiwanese Film Festival (TWFF) gets its films and builds the programme, going into what currently excites Benson about the Taiwanese Film industry and what frustrates him, wrapping up with a discussion on how he came to be where he is and if this is the path he always wanted.

Billy:
How do you choose those films? How do you make up your programme?

Benson:
We often have this tick box divided by different genre such as horror film, comedy, action, LGBT queer content, or art house cinema, and documentaries. Some films will stand out and then we can easily use them for that category, but documentary is often the hardest one. I really like documentaries, so I often have like top 3 favourites and I can’t narrow it down to just one to be in the program. That’s when another programmer will come in to say which one they think is better. That’s kind of how we programme. Every festival is different, like for SXSW when we programme it is just a load of films, like 300 films. We have to watch them all first and get a sense of the styles of the submissions this year and then put them into categories for how we’re going to programme it. It is more of an abstract way to start. For the Taiwan Film Festival because it is all from Taiwan it just really needs to be put into genre boxes.

Billy:
So that box system becomes very important then, it shapes what you will show because with that kind of system you don’t want to get too many of the same genre? You’d create excitement and a sense of refreshment by showing a variety of different films.

Benson:
Exactly, exactly.

Billy:
Then do you ever get a group of films, like you were saying with the documentaries, which are all great but then you know you’ve got to say no to one because they’re both too similar or too close of a genre?

Benson:
This comes to the sad part when we often say no it is based on if we can sell tickets or not. It is a bit sad, but I think for us, because we are so small we don’t have that already existing massive database like other major festivals have. We’re still on the journey to building that. If anything sells less than 50% of its capacity, then we lose a lot of money. That’s something we have to often take into a very heavy consideration when we do the programme. It’s tough.

Billy:
Okay, wow, I can see that. That’s so limiting, it really means you can’t just show a film that you loved and just shrug your shoulders if you get a smaller turnout. Also, I guess you have to take into consideration that it’s not your money, it’s someone else’s sponsorship, so you can’t just throw it away.

Benson:
Yeah, that’s right. As we run independently, we’re not really fully supported by the government or fully supported by the local council. This kind of financial management is something we really handle quite carefully. We have to find that balance between the finances, most of the festivals have this problem of cash flow because with the government funding or anything like that, you don’t get the full sum of the money when you get the grant, it is always like 50% before and 50% after the festival. Then you have to figure out how you find the money to keep the festival moving? There are all those kinds of dramas keeping it exciting.

Billy:
Pivoting away a bit I want to dive into how you actually find the films that you show at your festival? How do you build the programme for the festival? Do you get people to go out and find them? Do you talk to distributors? What’s the approach?

Benson:
So, there’s three ways. We do a call for submissions where a lot of independent or established distributors already know us, so they’ll send through films on filmfreeway. We also do look at other big festivals, their programmes and to see if there are any Taiwanese films or co-productions, then we’ll contact the distributor or producer and say, “oh would you be interested to submit to our festival as well?”.  The other is a lot of independent research just on what’s coming up in Taiwan, knocking on doors and seeing if the filmmakers are interested to submit to us.

Billy:
I imagine you’d have to offer some filmmakers something or find a way to convince some filmmakers to show at your festival?

Benson:
For some of the bigger titles, yes , for example the Great Buddha+ first got selected at SFF in 2018. A lot of larger distributors won’t say yes to us until they get the final answer from other bigger festivals. This year the biggest one we were trying to get is Didi. We really wanted Didi. I thought that would do so well in our festival and unfortunately MIFF wanted the Australian premiere. We had to give that up unfortunately, then there was another one called Pierce that we really wanted to screen that went to the Adelaide Film Festival for the premiere. We do try to convince the distributors, it is good to get in SFF and MIFF but at the same time, even if their film gets in they are competing with another 200 films that’s already in the programme and the Taiwanese film often won’t be the spotlight in the programme. I say if you put the film at TWFF, you can be the spotlight, you’ll get more coverage, you’ll be more important here. Though that comes to the sad part in this industry as well, when you get selected into a higher tier festival, you get more funding from your country [or other sources as well]. It’s often not just about your audience numbers but it’s the tier of the festival.

Billy:
Sounds like it all becomes a bit of a battle based on who gives the filmmaker the greatest exposure and when in the year other festivals are playing.

Benson:
A hundred percent, we just have to fight for it. At the same time, that’s the fun part of it for some people, they enjoy it. I know a lot of my programmers enjoy fighting for the film, they get really excited about it.

Billy:
Haha, that sounds like it must be exhausting.

Benson:
It is especially when we go on sale at the end of June. We really want to lock in our programme soon as possible, but we are kind of stuck in the middle waiting for SFF and MIFF to lock in. their program in order for the distributor to give us the film. Originally, we started in Sydney so we thought as long as we don’t clash with SFF, we’ll be okay. Now that we are travelling around to different cities we’re trying to avoid MIFF. During MIFF, we don’t have any screenings, so the festival seems longer, but there’s actually a two week gap, where we don’t do anything. That way MIFF can do their own thing and we don’t clash with them. We’re still learning, we’re still young, we’re only seven years old.

Billy:
I know you sometimes do retrospectives. How do you go about putting those on? How do you organise those legacy films that like, as you mentioned earlier, Edward Yang?

Benson:
Oh, it’s a nightmare. For the Edward Yang retrospective I’ve got to give the credit to the Art Gallery of NSW. We partnered up with them as a bit of promotion. They did all of the work themselves which was pretty incredible. It’s just a very hard thing (retrospectives), During Covid when we had online screenings, it was easier to make the program bigger which can include retrospective because the cost of cinema rental wasn’t there. But when we went back into the cinema, we just realised we won’t be able to keep it up.  There’s no way we can introduce new directors’ work [through a retrospective] and still sell more than 50% of the capacity to the cinema audience in Australia. We shifted away a bit from that, instead we just do a one or two film retrospective. We are still learning in this process. This year we’re quite lucky to get to officially work with AGNSW. Other cities like MIFF and GAGOMA often doing Tasi Ming-liang’s films, I’m just like, do we really need to do anything if they are already doing it?

Billy:
Yeah, sure. Those classic names are everywhere, aren’t they?

Benson:
Yes and they’re really expensive. It’s not something we can afford, so I’m kind of glad the galleries or the bigger festival are doing it.

Billy:
As you say we know bigger names but we don’t always know the newer upcoming ones. What are some names that people can go out and try to watch after reading this? What films should we be paying attention to from Taiwan?

Benson:
I really enjoyed this year’s opening film Old Fox by Hsiao Ya-Chaun. I’ve always been a big fan of his work since TWFF started in 2018. The audience here has slowly become more familiar with his work as well.

Billy:
If I’m right. Wasn’t Old Fox executive produced by Hou Hsiao-Hsien?

Benson:
Yeah, it is. Hsiao Ya-Chaun’s earlier work, especially the previous one, Father to Sun is very, very much Hou’s kind of style. Old Fox I found to be slightly more commercial in a way, digestible for the general audience as so they can sort of still feel a little bit arty. I think dir Hsiao is trying to find that balance. Another one I really like, the one we will probably play in 2025, is a five hour documentary called From Island to Island, directed by Lau Kek-Huat, he’s originally from Malaysia and moved to Taiwan. His work has been really, really powerful and political. He’s tackling the history of Taiwan that not a lot of Taiwanese people want to dig in and to revisit.

Billy:
That sounds fantastic. You seem to be quite excited by what is coming out now in Taiwan, filmwise. I guess a lot of us, at least I have a certain impression that the Taiwanese film industry has changed for the worse over the years, do you think that’s not true?

Benson:
This is tough. It’s been up and down really. I don’t think 2024 has been the strongest year. Also, internationally when we do all the programming for other festivals, it hasn’t been the strongest year as well. I don’t know if it’s because we’re still going through this kind of post covid period, in which a lot of films have been delayed or held. I think Taiwanese cinema has come to a little bit of a desert period, it is quite sad. We are in this position, everyone’s too comfortable in the stereotypical type of film and narrative structure. Not a lot of people are trying to break out the boundaries in Taiwan, but also I think people are just struggling so they just want to make commercial fast food production content and move on to the next project. Then there’s so many TV series on demand in Taiwan, everyone is just sort of moving to that direction as well. I think if you look at the result of this year’s Golden horse, the strong ones are found in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, China, and other countries. And I think that has been the trend we are seeing, especially in 2024. There are so many strong Southeast Asian films that’s really outstanding that break that stereotypical kind of narrative structure.

Billy:
Australia is pretty similar.

Benson:
I think so too.

Billy:
We’re in that kind of spot right now where there’s not much happening when it is happening. It’s like, oh, that’s it, that’s all we’ve got. Is it?

Benson:
Yeah, always a prison, always a desert, always the bush, I mean, come on, there’s more. I think that’s why we are trying to do this pitching competition this year, it’s about adapting from a book, it’s a more refreshing way of telling a story. We got 20 submissions nationally around Australia and that really makes me realise that there is a market. People are eager for this kind of support, as it allows them to focus on shaping existing material into cinematic magic rather than struggling to come up with an entirely new script from scratch.

Billy:
That’s awesome. And it gives a chance to people to actually, I guess like the old days, actually just direct and make the film, not have to be the writers. Not everyone’s a writer, someone might be a good director and all other things but if they have to write it, they’ll shoot themselves in the foot.

Benson:
Exactly. There are so many big titles in Hollywood adapted from a book. That’s something we should really look into and there are so many good writers in Australia as well. Their stuff should be adapted into films.

Billy:
It seems so out of reach because how much books can sometimes cost to buy the rights for. Sometimes it seems so far away, something for other people.

Benson:
Yes, I agree. That’s why I think it’s a good thing we’re trying to not only promote international co-production and how to do that but also about IP adaptation and asking how does that work? That kind of knowledge hasn’t really been talked about much, I don’t think, in Australia.

Billy:
Let writers be writers, no matter what country they can make the work better.

Benson:
Yeah, exactly.

Billy:
I wanted to briefly touch on the newsletter that you do because I like that it’s not just while the festival’s running, you keep it going and you talk about other films, market other films that are playing. What’s the goal with that and how hard is that to run?

Benson:
Super hard. It’s very time-consuming. I mean if other people have done marketing as their full-time job, they know sometimes to write this kind of content, even just for one festival, it probably takes them a whole day or at least half day to do it. We spend a lot of time doing it and not getting paid. The goal is the same as what we’re trying to achieve with the festival. It’s to get our audience to step out of their comfort zone to watch films that they don’t usually watch. In a way it’s sort of like a win-win situation. If we promote this festival, their content and the audience go to see it, they get more knowledge about what a cinephile’s film is, it builds a kind of knowledge of film history. Then when they come to our programme there’s something there for them to compare it to. I think it’s a healthy cycle to do.

Also at the same time I notice a lot of the bigger festivals, they rarely really promote their own Asian content. Often the bigger titles that won at Cannes and an award winner often from Europe gets more marketing promotion even at festivals. We really want to build that awareness of what other Asian content is being played in Australia. As people should really be more aware of it as well. It’s a very ambitious dream we are trying to build.

Billy:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s kind of a self-fulfilling cycle once they get an appetite as well for these films, it grows and grows and as you were saying, building an audience, allowing you to show different kinds of film.

Benson:
That’s right. Then they can compare, they can talk to each other and then that feedback will help us next year to know what the audience’s taste buds are and know what we should do next year.

Billy:
Just as we finish off, I would like to ask one or two questions about you and how you ended up here. You mentioned that you did some interning at some of the other festivals. Was films festivals the path you always wanted to go or is it just where you ended up?

Benson:
I started during uni. I started at Queer Screen only because I didn’t have a lot of queer friends around me when I was at Uni, so I was like how can I get to know the community a bit more? That’s when I joined Queer Screen and it’d been a lovely experience I’ve had there. That’s when I was like, okay, film festivals are really good, it really brings in the community that I really want to be part of. That’s when I moved into Sydney Film Festival and then I really enjoyed it as well. Everyone was really cool. Then I hit a breaking point after three years of the festivals. I was just really poor. I was like “Oh can I even make a living out of this?” I think everyone goes through this period, when they ask “do I really want to stick with this industry?” During and after covid, I think it took me about 3 years to finally realised yes I want to stick with film festival industry. I don’t fit into the corporate bubble. Either I’ll go back to being full-time at film festivals or I’m just going to keep working for different festivals. I find it really meaningful what I do, it pushes me to learn and break my boundaries. Definitely money is always a struggle, but I think that’s something I learned over the years is, getting paid a lot of money isn’t the point. I don’t need that much money. What am I going to do with it? I’ve learned how much I need to live, my minimum which I can still live happily on. I don’t need to buy a new shirt or new shoes every week.

Billy:
You discover what you care about, what you want to do with your life and then you just figure it out. You adjust to what you need to make it happen

Benson:
Exactly.

Billy:
What is it about the festivals  that makes you so excited, so willing to put the hard yards in for it?

Benson:
Definitely the audience and the team. You train the interns and the volunteers and see them become successful in this industry, I think that part is the most rewarding. You see you’re doing something impactful to the community or to society.. I think with the audience it’s really exciting as well. You’re just constantly challenging the audience to watch something they won’t watch otherwise, sometimes when they watch they find that they have learned something and you’re like that’s the reason why I do this fucking festival. Those are definitely two of the biggest reasons for me to do this.

Billy:
Yeah, I think it’s so important to challenge what we think of film and what we watch. We too often just accept what is in front of us. It’s so great you’re trying to offer up cinema that we may miss out on, that we may have never even tried to look for. I think that is a really good place to end it off. This has been insightful, I’ve learned so much. It’s been fantastic! You guys work so hard on this festival and I hope people reading this will see just how much effort you put into the Taiwan Film Festival and decide to make a little time for these small festivals. To take a chance on a film they have never heard of and brave it in the heat. Thanks again for being the first interview of this new series.

Benson:
No – thank you for having me.