ABSTRACT

Anchorage Prohibited (Taiwan, 2015) by the Singapore-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker, Chiang Wei Liang shows two Vietnamese labor immigrants holding a baby wandering the fringes of Taoyuan, Taipei. The film won the Audi Short Film Award at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. His next film, Luzon (Taiwan, 2017)—set in the Luzon Straits—stages maritime conflict through an encounter between a Taiwanese fisherman, a Filipino fisherman, and a nuclear waste barrel from China. Through these two works and Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, this chapter begins with the premise that environmental ecologies are intertwined with lived ecologies of migration in Taiwan that should be further examined alongside shifting ecologies of cinematic production and exhibition. Arguing for an expansive vision of the ecocinematic, this chapter extends the inhospitality that results from regimes of inclusion/exclusion, including divisions of natural/artificial, citizen/guest/foreigner, or human/monster, to the infrastructural ecologies such as film school, film funding, and international film festivals that the works and the filmmaker are embedded in. From this entangled ecology of cinema, migration, and the sea, the chapter asks how the ecocinematic could be a site of hospitality within what Jennifer Fays call an “inhospitable world.”