Transpacific Exposure: women filmmakers as nodes in the cultural network

Both of the independent documentaries Love Boat: Taiwan (2019) and Havana Divas (2018) examine transpacific flows of people and cultural practices. Directed by Valerie Soe, a third-generation Chinese American from San Francisco, Love Boat: Taiwan presents the history and individual stories about a well-known summer camp offered by the Taiwanese government for non-local youth, notorious for its reputation as a place for college-aged Taiwanese Americans and overseas Chinese to find romance. Directed by S. Louisa Wei, a Chinese filmmaker, producer, writer, and professor based in Hong Kong, Havana Divas explores the lives of two stage sisters in Havana who learned the art of cantonese opera from a Chinese immigrant and once performed regularly throughout pre-Castro Cuba. The films utilize a participatory mode, making the women filmmakers identifiable characters within the films who regularly interact with their subjects. However, both women filmmakers also actively facilitate cultural exchange by preserving and exposing fading ethnic Taiwanese American and Cantonese Cuban traditions respectively to a wider transpacific community. This paper discusses the notion of transpacific exposure as a form of pedagogical filmmaking that narrates the affective experience of engagement with deterritorialized cultural flows, focusing on the woman filmmaker’s search for cultural commonalities across oceans.