Taiwanese American filmmaker Valerie Soe spoke about her documentary “Love Boat: Taiwan” with ArtsEmerson’s Susan Chinsen Feb. 14 at the Paramount Center. (Image courtesy of Yanxuan Li.)
Taiwanese American filmmaker Valerie Soe attended a screening of her documentary Feb. 14 at the ArtsEmerson Paramount Center. “Love Boat: Taiwan” depicts a half-century-long study tour program, organized by Taiwan’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission and the China Youth Corps.
Launched in 1967, “love boat” brought more than 1,000 Taiwanese and Chinese American youth and college students to Taiwan every year, for them to explore their cultural identity. It is one of the longest-running summer camps in the world.
“There are some diplomatic aims in launching this program,” Soe said. “But for most of the participants, they were just thinking of this as kind of a giant party. And the government has been holding these for many years, because they know that was a way to get young people to go.”
The four-week summer program was formally known as the Overseas Compatriot Youth Formosa Study Tour to Taiwan, but most attendees affectionately refer to it as the “love boat.” The program educates attendees on the culture and history of Taiwan, and promotes a more independent and diverse image of Taiwan to the world.
Feedback to the film has been positive. “Some people shared their stories with me, saying, ‘I met my husband during that trip, you know!” Soe said.
Soe started thinking about making a love boat film in the late 1990s.
“But then I got a kid in 2000, and then I had another kid in 2003,” Soe said. “So there was no movies made for a long time. And then around 2012, 2013, I started to travel more to Asia, and I thought, ‘Oh, I remember this film I was gonna make.’”
“I found that if you were a Taiwanese American or Chinese American, you had heard of this program,” Soe said. “But if you were outside of being Chinese or Taiwanese American, not many people knew what it was. So for me, it made me think that there was such a big phenomenon in this community, versus outside this community, where’s nobody heard of it. This was really interesting to me. So I wanted to kind of bring this story to the screen because of that.”
It was when Soe started to reach out to friends did she realize how popular love boat was, and what an impact it has on the participants.
“We have some of the traditional funding, but a large amount of the budget, especially for the post-production, was from crowdfunding,” Soe said.
Soe conducted crowdfunding campaigns, with an overwhelming response from previous trip participants. The program has had an estimated run of 45 to 50 years, with trips still taking place.
“At the peak of it, there were 1,000 to 1,200 people who went each year, for about 10 years,” Soe said. “So there were a lot of people who wanted to see this movie.”
