Jean-Marc Therouanne from France and Tsai Po-cheng from Taiwan are the winners of the 28th Taiwan-France Cultural Award, the Ministry of Culture announced Dec. 11 in Taipei City.
According to the MOC, Therouanne and his wife Martine launched the Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema in 1995, with its creation widely hailed as one of the 10 most important milestones of French cinema. The event is also the longest running film festival of its kind in Europe.
Over the past 30 years, Therouanne has selected 80 films produced or directed by Taiwanese filmmakers for screenings at FICA, invited them to take part in the event and penned more than 300 pages of critiques and reviews of Taiwan’s cinema culture and movie productions. His commitment to introducing Taiwan films to France has played a key role in promoting the country’s cinematic culture to a wider global audience, the ministry said.
Tsai Po-cheng founded New Taipei City-based B.Dance contemporary performing arts group in 2014 and serves as its current artistic director. He graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts and also attended Purchase College in New York. Tsai’s works are often based on his own life, with the most successful pieces including Floating Flowers, which won the Audience Award and the Gauthier Dance/Stuttgart Theater Production Award in 2014, and RAGE, which won him the “best emerging choreographer of the year” from the France National Board of Performance Arts in 2020.
Established in 1996 by the MOC and the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the annual award is presented to distinguished individuals or groups that have helped raise awareness of Taiwan in Europe or facilitated cultural exchanges. Starting in 2006, submissions for the award have broadened to include all European countries. (SFC-E)
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