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Tudou Video Festival 2009 (?????)

This weekend the 2nd edition of the Tudou Video Festival took place in Shanghai. Compared to last year’s event, this year’s edition was a lot bigger and produced very professionally. Last year’s event in an old church high up in the mountains in Moganshan was great, but it still had a start-up feeling. The 2nd edition felt almost like the Oscars, something the presenter (Hu Yi Hu from Phoenix TV) also said.

Awards were handed out in 16 categories during the night. In total there had been 2000 video submissions and 5 million people voted online for the videos. During awards night an audience of 1000 people attended the ceremony, among others famous actors and presenters, government officials, business people, venture capitalists and film directors. The event was streamed live on Tudou as well and several TV camera’s recorded the whole evening. Winners not only received the Tudou Video Award, but also a BenQ 42″ plasma TV, a notebook computer and a desktop computer (thanks for sponsoring BenQ!).

I enjoyed the evening very much and was once again surprised by the high level of creativity. User generated content can compete with professionally produced content, that’s what this evening proved to me. Several of the selected directors will get the chance to work with the China Film Group. Who knows, maybe the next Zhang Yimou was among our winners last night!

If you want to see some of the winning films on Tudou, you can see all of them here. The categories are all in Chinese, but if you mouse over them you will see the English name in the link.

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