A disembodied hand arranges three documents on a table: a Taiwan passport, a United States passport and a travel permit issued by China.
“More and more, I feel like a kid whose parents are involved in a three-way custody battle — hostile, codependent, manipulative. … They all think they know what’s best for me. They don’t care what I want,” S. Leo Chiang says in a voice-over.
The director has spent much of his life going back and forth between the three places. While his previous films explore cultures “other than my own,” this one is personal, he says. “Island in Between” takes him to Kinmen, just a few miles off the coast of the Chinese city of Xiamen.
