TAPETUM LUCIDUM 2026 – The 10th Taiwan International Cat Film Festival

TAPETUM LUCIDUM 2026 – The 10th Taiwan International Cat Film Festival

In an era when generative images expand at infinite speed, images are no longer captured but manufactured, and cinema is no longer a record of light and shadow but the result of computational processes. Global tensions are pulled between political borders and algorithms; images of war and entertainment are juxtaposed on the same silver/screen, and the boundary between reality and fiction can no longer be clearly drawn. The world continues to move forward through everyday life, yet the flood of images has quietly transformed how we perceive light, time, and existence.

At such a moment of transition, the Cat Film Festival arrives at its tenth year. Over the past decade, we have taken cats as our point of departure to rethink the meaning of “cinema.” To watch is not to fix one’s gaze on an object, but to return to the perception of oneself. It is not about extracting images, but about learning how the world unfolds before us. With their ancient and silent bodies, cats remind us that the essence of images has never been technology, but traces of time; and that cinema has never been mere representation, but a renewed seeing and gazing upon life itself.

This year, we invite eight renowned creators who, through different methods and modes of thought, jointly construct a matrix of the Cat Film Festival. This matrix is neither a symbol nor a form; it is like a film yet to be screened, a roll of film still in the process of development. Each selected work this year is a shared breath between humans and cats, a gentle moment, and a questioning of images. Cats are both subject and method. They wander across a decade of images, teaching us—through their cinematic trajectories—how to sense the folds of time and how to discern reality within the seams of images.

The Cat Film Festival is not held for cats, but through cats, as a way to seek a mode of viewing that is closer to the essence of life and art. The tenth edition is not a retrospective, but a philosophical comma. At this moment, we regard the accumulated understanding of the past ten years as an unfinished film: one with multiple narrative axes, diverse historical currents, and many image-moments still awaiting interpretation.

Thus, “10” is not merely an anniversary marker, but a model of perception. In an age of infinite image reproduction and constantly deforming realities, through the tenth Cat Film Festival we reaffirm the possibilities of cinema as an art form. At this moment, ten years on, the Cat Film Festival remains as light and gentle as a cat’s footsteps, leisurely guiding us toward the future without haste. There, cinema is still full of new possibilities, the Earth continues to turn, and the Cat Film Festival will remain a shared utopian space of resistance for cats and for us.

2026 Participating Artists

• Bill Brand (US)
• Yuri Obitani (JP)
• Andre Birken (DE/PT)
• Devin Shears (CA)
• D.K. Odessa (US)
• Ming-Yu Lee (TW)
• Bamboo Hsu (TW)
• Tanya + Saymon (RUS)

For more information, please refer to the festival website.