Director‘s Statement:
My love for—and deep fascination with—oceanic culture led me to discover this small Pacific island: Orchid Island.
The first time I encountered its name was probably during my university years, when I watched a Shaw Brothers film from the 1960s, Song of Orchid Island. That was also the first time I learned about the Tao people, an Indigenous group of Taiwan, who are referred to in the film as the Yami.
In 2022, while conducting field research and archival studies on “maritime peoples of the Greater China region” for a fiction film about the Tanka communities along the Guangdong coast, I read Recollection of the Waves and The Face of a Navigator by Orchid Island writer Syaman Rapongan. From that moment on, I became deeply intrigued by this remote island adrift in the sea, far from the mainland.
In 2024, through a Visual Anthropology documentary project at Goldsmiths, I had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan for filming, and formally placed this project into development. During the early stages, I began by collecting extensive materials online and in archives, gradually forming a preliminary vision of the final film. My intention was to create an Ethnographic Archives Documentary, combining historical archival materials with on-site, lived documentation.
Three months before shooting, I was fortunate to make contact with Ms. Hsieh Fu-mei, an Indigenous Tao woman from Orchid Island, who has long been documenting her own community through documentary filmmaking and photography. This became a crucial turning point that made the film possible. I found a third eye through which to approach this Pacific island—a bridge that allowed me to genuinely connect with the place in reality.
The ocean is the soul.
Flying fish are companions.
Orchid Island is nature’s home.
And the Tao people’s stars are the shimmering longings reflected on the surface of the sea.