Producer-director Vanessa Hope has worked on a number of films about China and its neighbouring nations, and this new one focuses on Taiwan, which is increasingly in the news as anxieties mount over a possible invasion by the People’s Republic across the Taiwan Strait. As a work of journalistic explication for interested but underinformed western viewers, it’s a bit all over the shop, although admittedly the history of the island is fiendishly complex and confusing.
We get some handy-dandy animated map-based graphics that explain how it passed through the hands of various colonialist invaders, from both Europe and Asia. Then it starts to get very confusing for neophytes when we get to the time when, having thrown off the shackles of imperial Japan (which ruled from 1895-1945), it became independent, known by the parenthetic handle the Republic of China (Taiwan). Yet it is still considered as a not yet entirely incorporated satellite by the People’s Republic of China, perpetually under threat of forced assimilation like Hong Kong.
In among the flurry of archive footage, Hope splices in interviews with numerous local Taiwanese politicians, including former president Tsai Ing-wen, a left-centrist who rejects reunification with the mainland, much to the ire of PRC president for life Xi Jinping. The film is clearly on Tsai’s side, portraying her in a flattering light throughout, not least when she is endearingly upstaged during an interview by her own talkative ginger cat. Xi, seen giving ominous speeches to huge assemblies of soldiers and tightly marshalled citizens, gets the full boo-hiss treatment thanks to a soundtrack that goes all sinister, not least when he’s telling bare-faced lies such as “we the Chinese people have never bullied, oppressed or subjugated the people of any other country”.
But this is a complex geopolitical and diplomatic subject, and for the most part the film honours and tries to reflect that complexity, noting along the way how Taiwan was ruled by martial law until 1987, a period called the White Terror which has its own bloodied hands. No conclusive or simple takeaway is on offer, but this film can serve as a helpful primer for those wishing to understand Taiwan a little better than the superficial.
• Invisible Nation is on digital platforms from 6 December.
