With international submissions hitting 60% and nearly 700 projects competing for 94 slots, the Taiwan Creative Content Fest has evolved from regional showcase to essential Asian content marketplace. This year’s selections reveal an industry-wide pivot towards literary adaptations, cross-border coproductions and strategic partnerships that leverage Taiwan’s unique position between the Far East and global markets.
The 2025 Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) has emerged as a bellwether for the shifting economics of international content production, and this year’s project selections tell a compelling story about where the global industry is placing its bets. With 94 projects selected from nearly 700 submissions across 44 countries, TCCF Pitching has become significantly more than a regional showcase. It represents a fundamental rethinking of how high-value intellectual property moves from page to screen in an increasingly interconnected Asia-Pacific market.
TCCF has emerged as a bellwether for the economics of international content
The numbers themselves reveal the transformation. International submissions and co-productions involving Taiwan accounted for 60% of entries this year, a remarkable figure that underscores TCCF’s evolution from a domestic platform to a genuinely global content marketplace. Beyond Taiwan, the top submitting countries read like a roll call of Asia’s creative powerhouses: Japan, Thailand, South Korea, and Singapore, as well as the US. This geographical diversity isn’t merely cosmetic. It reflects the practical realities of modern content financing, where single-territory commissions increasingly give way to multi-partner structures that share both risk and market access.
The festival’s Project segment, featuring 56 pitches across diverse genres, demonstrates a pronounced shift towards literary adaptation as the preferred route to internationally viable content. This trend carries significant implications for producers navigating an oversaturated development landscape. Proven intellectual property, particularly award-winning literature with existing international recognition, provides crucial de-risking in markets where pure spec development has become financially precarious.
Taiwan Travelogue exemplifies this dynamic perfectly. Yang Shuang-zi’s novel won the prestigious US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024, providing the adaptation with both cultural cachet and a ready-made international audience familiar with the source material. The novel, set during Taiwan’s Japanese colonial period in 1938, follows a Japanese novelist exploring the island’s culinary culture while navigating a complex relationship with her Taiwanese guide. Its themes of cultural exchange, female companionship, and the politics of language offer rich dramatic territory while addressing contemporary concerns about identity and colonialism through historical narrative. For international buyers, this combination of literary pedigree and thematically resonant storytelling significantly reduces acquisition risk.
Similarly, The Ones I Killed and the Ones Who Killed Me, adapted from Higashiyama Akira’s acclaimed Japanese novel, arrives with built-in credibility. The cross-border nature of this adaptation, bringing together Taiwanese production expertise with Japanese source material, illustrates how contemporary co-productions leverage complementary strengths. Taiwan’s production infrastructure and government support mechanisms combine with Japan’s literary tradition and established audience for mystery-thriller narratives.
The animation selection A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts, based on Asian American food writer Ying Chang Compestine’s young adult horror collection, represents another variation on the adaptation strategy. Here, the appeal lies in culturally specific storytelling with demonstrable crossover potential. Young adult horror has proven remarkably exportable, while the food-centric approach provides visual richness that animation can exploit. The project’s selection suggests TCCF’s judges recognise that genre storytelling rooted in specific cultural contexts can travel more effectively than watered-down attempts at universal appeal.
Cross-border collaboration is key
Documentary selections reveal parallel thinking. Huang Hui-chen’s LOMÁ carries the imprimatur of Berlinale recognition, where the filmmaker previously won a Teddy Award. Documentary with festival pedigree increasingly attracts significant acquisition interest, particularly when addressing subjects with international resonance. Meanwhile, Atomic Paradise, headed by a two-time Emmy nominee, demonstrates how individual creative track records function as de facto guarantees of production quality and editorial sophistication.
The feature film selections showcase the practical mechanics of international co-production. Spent Bullets, based on Terao Tetsuya’s bestselling Japanese novel, will be co-adapted with Taiwanese filmmaker Henry Tsai. This partnership structure allows access to Japanese literary IP while leveraging Taiwan’s production incentives and Tsai’s established relationships. Such arrangements have become standard practice, but TCCF’s platform provides crucial infrastructure for formalising these partnerships and introducing projects to potential additional partners and buyers.
Goodbye My Love, Calendar Studios’ Taiwanese version of the Korean drama Do It One More Time, exemplifies the growing trade in format adaptation within Asian markets. Korean content’s global success has made its formats valuable commodities, while localisation for specific markets creates opportunities for producers who might struggle to generate wholly original IP. The Taiwanese adaptation allows Calendar Studios to leverage proven storytelling structures while tailoring tone, setting, and cultural specificity for domestic audiences, with potential for subsequent international sales.
Diary of Summer arrives with considerable pedigree, pitched by Japan’s ROBOT Communications, the production company behind Godzilla Minus One. The involvement of such an established player signals TCCF’s growing credibility with major production entities who previously might have bypassed regional content markets in favour of direct distribution deals. ROBOT’s participation legitimises the pitching process while raising the competitive bar for other selected projects.
Particularly noteworthy is Second Woman, which previously won both the FriDay Video Original Story Award and the TVBS Storytelling Impact Grant Award in TCCF 2023’s Story to Screen segment. Its return this year as a Project selection demonstrates the festival’s increasingly sophisticated development pathway. This progression from raw story to production-ready project with attached financing and distribution plans provides a compelling case study for how regional content platforms can nurture projects through the entire development cycle rather than functioning merely as one-off pitch opportunities.
Nearly 700 projects are competing for 94 slots
The fact that several Project selections also made this year’s Golden Horse Film Project Promotion – including Taiwan Travelogue, The Ones I Killed and the Ones Who Killed Me, Burning Blossoms, Spent Bullets, Soul Lantern, and Spring’s Grocery – validates TCCF’s curatorial credibility. Golden Horse’s international reputation lends additional prestige while potentially opening additional financing and distribution channels for these projects.
The jury composition for the Project segment reflects TCCF’s international ambitions. Boyun Choi from Korea’s Studio Dragon, a division of CJ ENM, brings perspective from one of Asia’s most successful content exporters. Luke Franklin, producer of Young Wallander, and Francis Chung, whose credits include Snowpiercer, Thirst, and The Thieves, offer expertise in adapting Asian content for international markets and vice versa. Nickson Fong Wei Ming’s Academy Award for Technical Achievement and Taiwanese actor Fu Meng-po’s involvement in Netflix’s upcoming series The Resurrected ground the jury in both technical excellence and platform-specific considerations.
The Story segment’s 38 selected published texts demonstrate TCCF’s commitment to earlier-stage development. Highlights include A Sketch of a Female Serial Killer: Taiwan’s Only Female Death Row Prisoner and the Murders that Shocked a Nation, which won the Taipei International Book Exhibition Grand Prize and was selected for Frankfurt Book Fair. This dual recognition – domestic and international – signals the kind of material that increasingly attracts production interest: socially conscious, culturally specific, yet addressing themes with universal resonance.
Bodacious Archdemons and Lifesaver Deployed, both selected as Taiwan’s representatives for the Busan Story Market, indicate how major Asian content platforms increasingly function as interconnected ecosystems rather than competing territories. Projects circulate between markets, accumulating credibility and potential partners at each stage.
The second edition of Shoot the Book TCCF, presented in partnership with SCELF and supported by Institut Français and the Bureau Français de Taipei, extends this international networking further. The inclusion of five French and three Taiwanese published works, including Jean-Christophe Grangé’s Flight of the Storks and Tymo Lin’s U.N.D.E.R.: The Jade Corpses, creates opportunities for European-Asian co-productions that might otherwise struggle to find development pathways.
For international buyers attending TCCF from 4 to 7 November at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, the projects on offer represent more than individual acquisition opportunities. They exemplify how mid-sized content markets like Taiwan are positioning themselves as essential bridges between larger territories. Taiwan’s unique position – culturally connected to both Greater China and Japan, with strong government support for international co-production, and increasingly sophisticated production infrastructure – makes it an attractive partner for projects requiring Asian elements but seeking to avoid the complexities of direct China co-production.
The 2025 selections suggest that TCCF has achieved critical mass as a content marketplace. The quality and diversity of projects, the calibre of attached talent and production entities, and the increasing international competition for selection all indicate that producers now view TCCF as a necessary stop on the Asian content circuit alongside Busan, Tokyo, and Singapore. For an industry searching for sustainable development models amidst fragmenting distribution and uncertain financing, TCCF’s emphasis on proven IP, international partnerships, and projects with clear market positioning offers a pragmatic template.
Whether these 94 projects ultimately secure production financing and distribution will depend on countless variables beyond TCCF’s control. But the festival’s role in creating structured opportunities for these conversations, providing credible curatorial validation, and facilitating relationships between previously disconnected partners represents genuine value in an increasingly complex content ecosystem. The projects selected for TCCF 2025 may represent the future of how international content gets made – through careful adaptation of proven material, strategic international partnerships, and platforms that bridge rather than separate the world’s content markets.
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