The Taiwan Creative Content Agency has granted financial assistance to a foundation honoring the legacy of the late filmmaker Chi Po-lin.
Chi Po-lin was an acclaimed documentarian and photographer who became well-known for his aerial footage of Taiwan from above and his films containing environmental messages. It was while filming such footage that Chi was killed in 2017 after the helicopter he was filming from crashed in eastern Taiwan.
Chi left behind nearly 110,000 photographic negatives, over 500,000 digital photographs, and close to 1,000 hours of filmed footage. In 2018, the year following Chi’s death, an organization called the Chi Po-lin Foundation was founded to organize and preserve this vast legacy.
The foundation is working to create a database of all this footage and all of these images. But limited funding means that progress has been slow.
Only 30% of the foundation’s current project, scanning and digitizing negatives, has been completed. This is because there is only enough money to hire one person to do the job full time and because the process is an expensive one that requires specialized skills and costly equipment to begin with.
The foundation also needs to find specialists to help digitally restore the original color to images that have faded or become discolored in Taiwan’s high heat and humidity.
The assistance of the Taiwan Creative Content Agency will ensure that Chi Po-lin’s art and the messages he hoped to convey through it will reach a wider audience and won’t be forgotten.