Diverse storytelling drives new filmmakers

Taiwanese filmmaking, as is the case with Taiwanese democracy, makes advances, but there are growing pains

By Joanna Lee

The Good Daughter, documentary by Sally Wu

A Malaysian student and a Filipino migrant worker find solace in one another in Lau Kek Huat’s Boluomi. Meanwhile, a Vietnamese woman grapples with her life as a ‘migrant bride’ in Taiwan, in Sally Wu’s documentary The Good Daughter. In the center of these recent films from Taiwan, characters who are not ‘Taiwanese’ bring into question what it means to be Taiwanese today, especially as the country continues to develop as a young, thriving democracy.   

“A lot of really young directors are coming out to tell the story, from their own perspective, of how to look at their national identity,” says Benson Wu, the festival director of Taiwan Film Festival in Australia, which screened both films as part of this year’s programme.

Taiwan Film Festival in Australia is a young festival, having just concluded its third edition on 31 July. With a small programming team painstakingly selecting around ten films out of 100 or so for every edition, Wu tells me via Zoom that he was especially taken by the filmmakers exploring stories centered around Taiwan’s new migrants this year – something he says many Taiwanese avoid: “They pretend this kind of society doesn’t exist.”

“But if you look at the older generation, a lot of parents were actually born in Vietnam or the Philippines, and these kids all grow up in Taiwan but can’t really identify with [their] background – which is a bit sad,” he says. “But I feel like we’re starting to see this kind of storytelling come out.”

Boluomi and The Good Daughter are just two films from a new generation of filmmakers who are responding to the changing face of broader Taiwanese society – and highlighting or challenging the social or political issues that underpin it. In addition to exploring Taiwan’s new migrants, other films in recent memory have sought to shed light on a range of contemporary topics, including sexual assault, student protest, local politics and even more prominently, gender identity and other LGBTQ themes.

Many of the Taiwanese New Wave auteurs of the late ‘80s and ‘90s have broached LGBTQ themes, as famously seen in Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet (1993), or Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L'Amour (1994). However, the open embrace of these stories by the mainstream today is a relatively new phenomenon, reflecting the major strides Taiwan has made in recent years to transform itself into a champion of progressive politics in the region, most visibly through the high-profile legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019.

“After it became a mainstream topic in the media, of course the commercial side of the film industry started to pick it up and use it as a product to sell,” Wu says.


Entrepreneur and activist Jay Lin at the Portico Media office

Jay Lin is a man who is, in many ways, right in the intersection of both social activism and the film industry. Not only is he a cofounder of the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival, the last few years have also seen him advocating marriage equality through the Marriage Equality Coalition, as well as expanding his media company Portico Media. For him, the ‘lack of fear’ of LGBTQ themes within Taiwan’s film and TV industry is already something that sets Taiwan apart from many other countries in the region.

“On the film industry level, you just don’t see a lot of producers or directors or even actors having many qualms about producing a gay film, or directing in a gay film, or playing in a gay film,” he says.

“You see that trickling down to TV stations, OTT services, or more production companies willing to take on LGBT stories and characters. That in itself is quite inspiring and quite courageous, compared to other situations in Asia.”

Indeed, in a region dogged by government censors and social stigma, which Lin likens to Hollywood’s production code of the ‘30s, the ‘other situations’ of Asia can result in rom-coms featuring gay characters taking on ‘R21’ classifications (as was the case for Love, Simon in Singapore), gay scenes being edited out, or Oscar winners being inexplicably pulled from festivals (Call Me By Your Name at the 2018 Beijing International Film Festival).

China’s censoring of LGBTQ themes reflect more broadly the notoriously hostile restrictions that pervade the country’s film and TV industry, which can be as extreme as banning the Winnie the Pooh film Christopher Robin, allegedly due to that cartoon character’s likeness to president Xi Jinping. These restrictions also find their way into neighbours Hong Kong and Taiwan, with those working within the industry often asked to pledge allegiance to the ‘motherland’.

Most recently and most famously, China’s film regulator caused an uproar in the Chinese-speaking world last year by banning filmmakers’ and actors’ participation in Taiwan’s ‘Chinese Oscars’, the Golden Horse Awards.

Such strict control of the media seems far removed from contemporary Taiwan, a country that has come a long way from its own authoritarian roots. It’s easy to forget that Taiwan had political dissent and creative freedom under its own chokehold during White Terror, a period that is inextricably tied to the development Taiwanese cinema itself, and that which is central to many of the acclaimed and beloved films from the ‘Taiwanese New Wave’. Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) are both direct responses to martial law of 1949 to 1987, as well as products of the country’s gradual shift away from authoritarian rule. And while White Terror found itself front and center once again in the recent blockbuster thriller Detention (2019), it is, in many ways, becoming more of a scary plot device, rather than a lived reality, for a younger generation of Taiwanese cinemagoers today.