Young Taiwanese filmmaker Flora Linghwa Huang won the Cineuropa Spotlight Award for her first feature-length documentary, The White Waters, after it was deemed to be the best project at the seventh edition of CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator during When East Meets West (see the news). We spoke to the director about the story, the background to it, her artistic approach and what she still needs to complete the project.

Cineuropa: What is the film about?
Flora Linghwa Huang: It is about middle-aged Vietnamese lady Hoang, who got married in Taiwan 30 years ago and has now settled in a village in southern Taiwan called The White Waters. Along with her, there are two women from mainland China and Indonesia, who also arrived for arranged foreign marriages. As their children have grown up and after some of their husbands and parents-in-law passed away, now, they are alone in this abandoned village. In the past few years, their home countries have changed rapidly, so they don't have a place to return to any more. Now, they need to find a new reason to be in this space.

Why did you decide to tell this story?
Taiwan is a homogenous society with a lot of immigrants, and there is a lot of racism. People with darker skin or who speak different languages are discriminated against and are considered second-class citizens. So, I was really interested in this question of Taiwanese identity and the place of people like Hoang in our society. 

How did you find Hoang and go about making the film?
I first wanted to make an environmental documentary, so I went to this village because they are facing some severe consequences of climate change, but after meeting the people there, I found I was more interested in them. Hoang, Hua from mainland China and Juan from Indonesia were the only people in the village who were not old, and they have really radiant, vibrant personalities. I developed a deep personal connection with Hoang, and she truly sees me as her adopted daughter. We were able to show more of her vulnerability and talk about how marriage and her obligation towards others shaped her, what her regrets are and so on. So that changed the direction of the story. It's no longer a commentary on social issues; I realised that I needed to put myself in the film and discover what identity meant for me.

How are you approaching this issue?
My mother was always taking care of my disabled father and all of us, and once, she told me she didn’t know who she was any more. This is what happens when you are projecting your self onto others: you lose your sense of self. But also, maybe this is one way of being yourself? This is confusing to me, and I want to explore it.

For Hoang, taking care of others is her purpose in life, and because of how education and society shaped me, to be an independent woman, to have a career, I never thought of it that way. After all, we live in a community, and this is the way she perceives herself, in relation to others.

Tell us a bit about your directing approach.
The first concept that I decided on was that I wanted to convey the sense of time. As it’s a village with few people, I will build the environment through sound design, creating a sensory experience with wind and waves. But when we move closer to our personal connection, the story will narrow down because I want to also include my own experience of the environment as an outsider. And then I'm focusing on Hoang. I'm not going to use any interviews in the film, but we had many spontaneous chats, and Hoang shared her short diary with me. I will also use some texts that she video-messaged to me, which are often poetic.

Visually, I want to focus on the body as a “site” of experience. Everything you go through in life is recorded on your body – your wounds, your pain… And it is impossible to convey pain with words. The body is like a vehicle for this, and Hoang experiences her self through her body. I find it fascinating to look close-up at those parts, and then understand that it’s a part of that person.

What is the production structure of the project, and what do you still need to complete it?
We have finished the development, and next month, I am going on a road trip with Hoang. We aim to wrap filming next year. I am producing through my company Autumn Film Production, with Yi Shan Lo on board as creative producer as well as Weina Zhao, of the Austrian NGO Gewächshaus, who is currently in the process of establishing her production company, RIPE, in Vienna. We are looking for a co-producer from South-East Asia, someone with a different experience and age to mine, who can help push the project to be more international, and bring in funds for production and post-production.