The first Experimental Media Art Festival in Taiwan (EXIT) will open in Taipei on Thursday featuring a wide range of avant-garde films from Asia and Canada that are rarely exhibited in museum galleries or screened in local film festivals. The four-day festival will run simultaneously with the Asia Forum, during which film curators, researchers and artists will gather and share their views on how to integrate the resources and set up a transnational platform to market the experimental films made by Asian artists. The first Asia Forum was held in Seoul last year. It will be the first time that movie lovers in Taiwan will be able to see experimental media works from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, and Canada in a single festival. Tony Wu, organizer of the EXIT, said in a press conference Wednesday that experimental films, unlike commercial features that provide fixed narrating styles and storylines, seek to engage in dialogues with viewers in a more direct way. 'Many of my students ask me how to understand experimental films, and I always tell them: Just make some personal connections with the works and you will find the filmmakers speak to you loudly, ' he told reporters. He said experimental films have actually played a vital part in the making of some of Taiwan's best-sellers or award winning films. Filmmaker Chung Meng-hung, who walked away with awards for best feature film and best director with 'The Fourth Portrait' in this year's Golden Horse Awards, used to work as an experimental director and he keeps applying elements of the avant-garde creation to his later features, to bring new dimensions to conventional films, according to Wu. An experimental artist himself, he said experimental films are often excluded from the contemporary art scene of Taiwan, making it difficult to let the works be known to the public. Receiving only NT$300,000 (US$10,000) grant from Taipei City Government, Wu said he has borrowed NT$700,000 from his family members and friends to make the 'EXIT' happen. 