“China’s Sundance” and Corporate Culture: Creating Space for Young Talent at the Tudou Video Festival

Abstract

Lee and Stringer provide the first scholarly analysis of the Tudou Video Festival, one of China’s leading cultural events. Based on interviews conducted with the festival’s organizers, the chapter examines its complex identity as a corporate event focused on grassroots creative talent as well as an offline/online hybrid organized in a different geographical location each year. After examining the event’s early aspiration to become the country’s equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival, Lee and Stringer investigate the major challenges that faced the organizers of its 2014 iteration held in Shanghai. The chapter concludes that the Tudou Video Festival is seeking to develop innovate models of operation, and identifies a need for film and media historians to acknowledge and account for the corporate presence in the organization of festivals.