It took director Vanessa Hope seven years to make the eye-opening doc “Invisible Nation,” for which she gained unprecedented access to Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen.
A longstanding expert on U.S. and China relations – which Hope first depicted in her 2015 debut doc “All Eyes and Ears” – Vanessa and her husband, producer Ted Hope, struggled with financing issues and the COVID-19 pandemic as they captured Tsai’s two consecutive terms, during which the president performed a delicate balancing act. She bolstered Taiwan’s right to sovereignty, forging closer collaboration with the U.S., while avoiding direct provocation of China amid rising worries about the country’s aggression.
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Below, Vanessa and Ted Hope speak with Variety about the complexities of making “Invisible Nation” prior to its international premiere on Nov. 14 at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
Vanessa, you’ve been observing China for a long time. What drove you to make “Invisible Nation”? It’s clearly a labor of love.
Vanessa Hope: Well, first off, let me say that right now everyone who is a China/Taiwan expert keeps describing the film as “right on time,” saying things like: “How’d you do it?” I’m like, “I had no fucking idea I could finally get it done.” All I knew was that I was going to get accused of trying to make a propaganda film for the president or a campaign film for the president. Because that’s the only conception people have of a film with a candidate in it.
How did the doc germinate?
Vanessa: Well, I had this sense that Taiwan is an important story that shouldn’t just be wedged into a U.S./China story. So when I finished my first film, I continued tracking developments there. I have a background in foreign policy. I worked at the Council on Foreign Relations. I felt there is this gap between that world and mainstream audiences, particularly in film. You see it now with what’s happening in Israel/Palestine and with Ukraine. People don’t know how to talk about what’s going on. If we are ever going to get to a place where there is better understanding, diplomacy and peace in the world, you have to at first be able to talk about these issues.
What baffled me when I went to work at the Council on Foreign Relations was: How in the world did our American foreign policy experts set up this country [Taiwan] in a position where it couldn’t avoid being a flashpoint for World War III? How did that happen?
How did you get access to president Tsai?
Vanessa: I had to apply and that was a very formal process. I submitted a proposal to the president’s office, and they took six months to review it. They finally invited me to have a meeting in April of 2017. President Tsai sat at a long table with my team and her administration, and we basically pitched it. But they had reviewed the proposal, and they had seen my first film, actually. She said “yes.” Then, suddenly it was like, “Come back in two weeks with your crew and be ready to go.”
Ted Hope: Don’t worry that you don’t actually have funding. That was our problem.
Speaking of funding, it sounds like this turned out to be a tough doc to finance. Why?
Ted: As we speak, there are 150 films on Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, and I was part of one [Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom”], right? But all of these films face a challenge getting access to platforms, to the global streaming platforms in particular. Right now, these global companies aren’t licensing such films at all. Why is that? Mostly because these companies account first to their shareholders who want to see future growth, and they want to see the opportunity to get into future markets like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Brazil.
Aside from being a geopolitical pawn, Taiwan is known as the world’s top maker of semiconductor chips. How does this factor in the tensions?
Vanessa: The reality of the geopolitics is that the Chinese Communist Party has wanted to take Taiwan long before they ever had a semiconductor industry. It’s not about the semiconductor industry, it’s about power, imperial ambition. It’s about – for them – they believe it’s theirs. It’s their own mythology. If they invade, those semiconductor fabs [fabrication sites] are on the West Coast of the island, they’ll be bombed. They’ll be destroyed. If they take over, the Chinese Communist Party leaders are under the complete delusion that they can take over those fabs. They’re under the complete delusion that those fabs are already theirs because the island is already theirs and everyone on it is already owned by them.
But that’s not true. Those fabs cannot be taken over by anyone else because the way they’ve built the industry is through trust, through gaining IP from European and other countries. They are the production facility of the chips. They don’t have the IP, they are entrusted with it. There is no way that those relationships can be handed over to anybody else. We examined that issue, and there’s the idea of the Silicon Shield, that because those chips are so valuable, China’s not going to invade. But in fact, they are. Basically, from our perspective, the chips became a moot issue. The news broadcasters have focused heavily on the chips. I’ve been personally offended on behalf of Taiwan’s ambassador Bi-khim Hsiao when she’s asked by journalists on the news, not about the 23 million lives at stake in Taiwan, but about the chips and how is Taiwan going to help the United States have their own chips in case everyone on that island dies and those chips are gone. I’m shocked and offended on her behalf. She has complete composure and diplomacy in answering these questions. But I was just like, you know what? That’s on the news. I’m telling a longer term story with a longer tail. It looks back at the history and it looks forward to where this is going. The chips are not the issue. It’s 23 million lives and their democracy that’s at stake!
Ted and Vanessa Hope
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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