The Third Shore is an international cultural platform founded to build sustained dialogue between Asia and Europe across cinema, contemporary art, science and ideas. Its Founding Edition launched in Venice in 2026 — the first chapter of a long-term platform, not a one-off event.
The Third Shore is an international cultural platform founded to create sustained dialogue between Asia and Europe across cinema, contemporary art, science, ideas and cultural practice.
Rather than treating East and West as settled cultural positions, The Third Shore proposes another space between them — where different disciplines, histories and ways of seeing can encounter one another without needing to collapse their differences.
Cinema is one point of departure, but not a boundary. Through conversations, artistic interventions, commissions and carefully constructed gatherings, the platform brings together filmmakers, artists, thinkers, scientists and institutions whose work crosses established fields.
The platform works on a simple principle: ideas should not remain abstract. They should move between disciplines, take material form, enter space and become conversation.
Launched in Venice in September 2026, the Founding Edition is the first chapter of what is conceived as a long-term cultural platform — not a one-off event.
To build a long-term international platform connecting Asia and Europe — beginning in Venice, growing from a founding gathering into an active ecosystem of exchange.
The platform extends a way of working already familiar to international filmmaking: bringing people from different cultural contexts together around a shared idea, and allowing new relationships to form through collaboration. What changes is the field of encounter. Cinema provides a common language, but the conversations around it extend into art, science, philosophy, cultural research and other forms of practice.
The platform moves across disciplines kept too often apart
Venice was the founding gesture. The next stage is to build the space around it.
Venice was the founding gesture. The next stage is to build the space around it — a long-term platform structured around three connected strands.
Using film and festival contexts as a common language for international exchange, production and co-production. Its producing slate already includes features in development with leading Asian artists and award-winning directors, and a co-production entering pre-production with a Berlinale Talents-selected director.
Commissioning and presenting artistic interventions that translate ideas into material, image and space. One to two international exhibitions are already scheduled for next year, developed with leading international artists and master craftspeople.
Continuing to convene an annual dialogue with leading European academic institutions and scholarly foundations, keeping research in continuous exchange with the artists, filmmakers and institutions the platform works with — and providing a stable structure around which new collaborations can take shape.
Future editions may take the form of focused conversations, artist collaborations, intimate salons, festival-adjacent gatherings and cross-disciplinary dinners. The format may change from city to city; the intention remains consistent.
What makes a gathering distinctive is not the number of disciplines represented, but the level of responsibility within them — people accustomed to making decisions, placed where the usual professional boundaries matter less.
Venice was the founding gesture. The next stage is to build the conditions in which relationships between filmmakers, artists, scientists, cultural institutions, journalists, investors and other decision-makers can develop over time — and we are looking for the partners who want to shape it from the beginning.