At the Golden Bell Awards last month, Vietnamese actor Lien Binh Phat took home the Best Leading Actor in a Television Series award for his role in the multilingual medical drama The Outlaw Doctor (化外之醫) — the first Vietnamese in the award’s history to do so. A paradigm shift in Taiwan’s cultural strategy is under way, and the New Southbound Policy’s (NSP) years-long push in the cultural sphere appears to be finally bearing fruit.
The Outlaw Doctor represents a reimagining of what is possible for the Taiwanese drama industry. Its success is proof that film and TV are at last no longer bound by the tired confines of family values, urban love stories and campus idols. Finally, we are becoming bolder and reaching for stories that, despite having long been played out on Taiwanese soil, are still overlooked: stories of immigrants, migrant workers, intermarriages and cultural clashes.
The award showed support for the show’s creators, who dared to push audiences outside their comfort zone. It also demonstrates that our truest form of localization is globalization — especially in a country where “local” is fundamentally multicultural.
To truly harness this shift, the government, and the film and TV industry should establish an NSP fund for the production of diverse Asian content. The Ministry of Culture and the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) should also establish a fund for coproduction of content with Southeast Asian input. Recipients should be encouraged or required to seek Southeast Asian talent in roles such as screenwriters, directors or actors, making cross-cultural cooperation the norm on and behind the screen.
Additionally, there should be a platform to train and match Southeast Asian talent to projects. Taiwan has no shortage of good actors such as Lien — what it lacks is the eye to discover them. The government should work with universities, colleges and performing arts centers to establish pathways for Southeast Asians to study acting, screenwriting or behind-the-scenes technology, and create an official talent pool that production teams could cast from and collaborate with.
Taiwan must go beyond viewing Southeast Asians as simply a source of labor, and instead value them as a rich pool of cultural and creative talent.
Finally, multilingual distribution should become a goal. Dubbing and subtitling shows into Southeast Asian languages such as Vietnamese, Indonesian or Thai could be a standard procedure in the early stages of production, rather than being added as an afterthought. TAICCA’s international promotion capacity should be taken advantage of, concentrating on multicultural content, and tapping into major streaming platforms and movie theaters in Southeast Asia. Taiwan can show audiences in the region that it can capture their stories too — perhaps with even greater depth than they might typically see at home.
More than just a trophy, Lien’s Golden Bell Award suggested that, amid fierce international competition, Taiwan has found a way forward through which it could demonstrate its value on the frontiers of culture. The nation has far more to show than just chips. Forget the silicon shield; what Taiwan must show the world is that the nation, with its freedom, democracy and diversity, can deliver some of Asia’s most multicultural and impactful stories yet.
Chen Jie-an is a legal specialist for a technology corporation.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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