Taiwan’s first film accepted to Viet Film Fest is a documentary uncovering a side to the history of Vietnamese Boat People long overshadowed. Building upon his earlier documentary A Camp Unknown (2023), Asio Liu Chihsiung’s Strangers and Their Babies covers the lives of four people of Vietnamese descent as they retrace their respective family’s dangerous journey across open waters from Vietnam to Taiwan. Strangers and Their Babies is a production of Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS).

The film’s four subjects are scattered across the world, having lived most of their lives in the United States or Taiwan. Their sense of belonging and identity is inextricably drawn from their families’ flights from Vietnam – which, for our subjects, casts psychological shadows similar to, but different from, most Boat People’s personal histories. And yet, they are the lucky ones.

Where places like Bidong Island (Malaysia), Galang Island (Indonesia), and various U.S. military bases across Southeast Asia and Oceania became important names in the history of the Boat People, Strangers and Their Babies examines two camps on Taiwan’s Penghu Islands. Neither were included in United Nations (UN) records. There, 106 babies were born during the refugee crisis, oftentimes without documentation. Combined with some of our subjects’ parents’ reluctance to speak about their experiences as Boat People, it is up to our subjects to uncover the lost chapters of their family’s stories.

By Eric Nong