The short documentary Island In Between may concern the uneasy relationship between Taiwan and its powerhouse neighbour China, but this relationship is viewed through a unique prism, that of the islands of Kinmen, situated a few miles from the coast of China.
Kinmen is a place that marks the frontline in Taiwan’s escalating dispute with China, and is also the location for director S. Leo Chiang to reflect on own his past spent partly in Taiwan, partly in the US, a little in China itself. These days he lives in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital.
Like most Taiwanese folk, director S. Leo Chiang had never been to these islands located so close to the Chinese mainland, until he visited with his parents a couple of years ago. When he was a kid, he recalls in the film, he was taught nationalistic songs about how the Taiwanese were the true Chinese in exile and how, one day, with military aid from the US, they would retake China from “the evil Communists.” The Kinmen islands would be the launching pad for that campaign of liberation.
In the late 1960s Chiang’s father undertook mandatory military service there, to the consternation of his own mother, yet while Taiwanese calls for the recapture of China became less frequent around this period, the residents of Kinmen were still expected to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the Chinese mainland. Eventually the Chiang family located to the US where young Leo spent most of his adult life, until he moved back to Taipei a few years ago.
“After so many years away, I’m still figuring out my own relationship to Taiwan and China. Kinmen connects Taiwan to China but also keeps them apart,” he says in the film. “Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to this place. I want to make sense of it. Growing up, this channel of water was the edge of our universe, separating good from evil.”
Chiang tells of a period, after the ferry between Kinmen and mainland China was opened, when China seemed to offer, for a decade or so, limitless opportunities for freedom and growth. “Those ten years [between] 2005 and 2015, it felt so exciting there. Things were opening up. All of these really interesting creative projects were happening economically, certainly culturally,” he explains to Business Doc Europe. “I met a lot of colleagues and collaborators and I filmed so many communities during that window. I was working with folk, so many great stories to tell, so many interesting, beautiful visual opportunities to explore in China. And it was such a challenge to my preconceived notion of what China [was]… So it was thrilling to be there.”
But the window wasn’t to remain open for long, Chiang regrets. “It makes me incredibly sad in the last few years to see how it’s turned, to see how the censorship has stepped up in a really scary way, to see what it’s doing to Hong Kong,” says Chiang. “I mean, if China was serious about wanting to have a closer relationship with Taiwan, what they did in Hong Kong certainly did not help. It really turned the Taiwanese public opinion squarely against the Chinese government.”
“It’s this feeling of loss, something good has gone away,” he adds. “I would like to think that that’s not a permanent situation…depending on the regime, depending on the leadership, depending on the policy of China, maybe it will come back to become a better global citizen and then be more open to the people that live there. But I don’t know, I think that the unknown is the challenging part at the moment.”
Chiang further points to particular characteristics among native Taiwanese that have developed from having an oppressive neighbour next door, noting to a “weird inferiority.” China is constantly talked about and compared to, the director observes, and there is the “historical ethnic relationship” and “cultural common roots” that result in a sense of Taiwanese nationals feeling “lesser than.”
“The second characteristic that I totally see directly [resulting from] this relationship with China is that Taiwanese people are very cautious,” Chiang continues. “People want to make sure that everything is taken care of, that you’re away from danger, that everything is set up properly so nothing bad will happen. I think a lot of that is because Taiwan has been under this threat from China for the last 70 years, and it’s a threat that Taiwanese people can do nothing about. And so what we do is…try to have control to make sure that nothing can go wrong in our personal life, because we have no control in our bigger existence.”
He adds how his observations of the local community on the Kinmen islands proved to be a “revelation,” in how they refuse to share wider fears of the Chinese threat. “Folks there really just think that nothing’s going to happen to them,” comments Chiang. “There is this overwhelming attitude that the outsiders are shrill and panicking for no reason. ‘The relationship is fine. China really cares about Kinmen and they will never do anything rash.’ So that was a surprise to me.”
Chiang only completed his film at the end of September 2023 so therefore missed the deadlines for the prestigious Cinema Eye Honours and IDA awards. Nevertheless the film received a berth on the New York Times Op-Docs site, and was completed in time to enter the Oscar 2024 race. “We wanted it to go out as wide as it can be, and we were really, in many ways, striving to partner with a platform like the New York Times.”
In his film, director Chiang also wanted to counter the widespread “simplistic assumptions” he encounters that Taiwan is actually part of China. On the other hand, he wanted “to provide a counterpoint to the journalistic information-based coverage that’s out there, and focus on what it feels like, what the ‘lived experience’ is like from a Taiwanese perspective.”
Back in March 2021, it was widely reported that China had ordered the cancellation of live broadcasts of that year’s Oscar ceremony following the nomination of Norwegian Anders Hammer’s Hong Kong pro-democracy film Do Not Split within the Short Documentary category. Does Chiang believe there could be a similar reaction to his film in 2024?
“Nobody knows what China will or will not do,” he responds. “In some ways, I think it would be foolish of them to do anything, because then that will make people be more curious about the film, which I certainly would welcome because I do want folks to see this perspective…I feel like I’ve been hearing stories from colleagues and friends, especially the Chinese friends who are in diaspora who live elsewhere, how they are coming to strange interactions with people who are clearly monitoring them. So I would like to kind of dismiss it as ‘oh, there’s no way.’ But I don’t know, it might happen. I have no idea,” Chiang signs off.
