The Golden Horse Film Festival 2021 identity features blurry backlit posters to reflect elements of filmmaking

In a world emerging post-pandemic, the Taipei event asks the film industry to re-examine its now varied relationship with audiences through a film poster which manipulates cinematic lens elements.

Date
12 August 2021

Re-focus, adjusting distance to the world. This is the theme for Taipei’s 58th Golden Horse Film Festival, the largest film festival in Taiwan. The Chinese-language festival, established in 1962, has revealed its moving digital posters to accompany the 2021 event.

Keng-Ming Liu led creative studio Bito’s Taipei-based design team with this concept in mind, resulting in what aims to be an elegant and sleek moving poster featuring simplistic metallic spherical or cubic elements behind a foggy foreground and muted block-colour backgrounds of white, mustard and deep-sea blue. The result hopes to be soothing and cinematic, reflecting the nature of the project.

Following the pandemic, Bito observed that there was a distance put not only between people but between people and films. The aim of the poster is to demonstrate the act of filmmakers having to re-examine and re-calibrate “the focus of our hearts”; keeping the lens moving.

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Bito: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival posters (Copyright © Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, 2021)

Attention to the details of the film-making nature of this project were not lost on Bito. The visual theme is inspired by camera lenses. Advancing camera shots capture three elements to the poster: Golden Horse Chinese characters, the Golden Horse trophy awarded to winners, and the ‘58th’ figure. The changes from blurry to sharp shots are meant to reflect the process of a lens focusing. Even the backlight processing method of the posters is meant to symbolise how “behind the scenes filmmakers have left the light and the lens to the screen and the actors so as to pay tribute to all their film crew”. Art direction for the campaign came from Wei-Hao Shao whilst design was the result of Wei-Hao Shao's and Chen-Lin Hsieh's collaboration.

The film festival will run from 11–28 November in Taipei, Taiwan. Bito’s campaign will run alongside the entirety of the festival.

GalleryBito: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival posters (Copyright © Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, 2021)

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Poster close-ups

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Poster close-ups

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Bito: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (Copyright © Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 2021)

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About the Author

Dalia Al-Dujaili

Dalia is a freelance writer, producer and editor based in London. She’s currently the digital editor of Azeema, and the editor-in-chief of The Road to Nowhere Magazine. Previously, she was news writer at It’s Nice That, after graduating in English Literature from The University of Edinburgh.

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