Production for Your Name Engraved Herein started in 2018, before the legislation for marriage equality was enacted in Taiwan. “We are not God so we don’t have the right to be like him and tell Adam and Eve, you are naked and sinful.” The tension between faith and sexuality is one of the main forces driving the film, which opens with a line from Song of Solomon 8:7: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”Ĭourtesy of Oxygen Films The bittersweet feeling of overdue change “During the process of writing the script, what I thought was that no one can play the role of God and judge people for their gender or who they want to love,” says Liu, who grew up in a Christian household. These scenes are not entirely drawn from Liu’s experiences with the priest at his school, but they reflect some of the director’s views. Some of the most piercing lines in the film come during the scenes when an exasperated A-Han questions this religious figure about why his love goes against the Bible’s teachings. Through A-Han’s perspective, Liu recounts aspects of his first love: crossing paths with a woman, played by Mimi Shao, who turned the relationship into a love triangle confiding in the school priest, Father Oliver, about his crush. He teamed up with producer Arthur Chu, who had attended the same high school as Liu and was familiar with his story. With the new project, the director wanted to create something more intimate.
Prior to this film, Liu had primarily worked on idol drama series that he describes as overly dramatic and mostly detached from reality. “This is about my first love, and my first love happened to be a story of a boy liking another boy.” Whatever his intention at the outset, Your Name Engraved Herein is fast on its way to becoming a new classic of LGBTQ cinema.
“Originally, my intention wasn’t to make a gay film, it was to make a personal film,” he says. The particular arc of A-Han is about “80%” based on Liu’s own experiences, according to the director. It’s against this backdrop that A-Han and Birdy’s story unfolds as their friendship grows into something more.
At the time, homophobia was widespread and openly gay individuals were largely ostracized by society. But the film focuses on a period long before this right existed, in 1987, when martial law had just lifted, prompting Taiwan toward a gradual transition in the direction of greater liberties including freedom of speech and press.
The movie screened locally beginning in September, more than a year after the self-governing island became the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Earlier in December, the movie surpassed NT$100M (around US$3.5M) and is one of only two domestic films to reach this marker in 2020. 23, is Taiwan’s highest-grossing LGBTQ-themed movie of all time. Of the few dozen LGBTQ films in the history of Taiwanese cinema, Liu’s has been the most successful at the box office- Your Name Engraved Herein, which premieres globally on Netflix Dec.