Your Name Engraved Herein

Martial law has just been lifted in Taiwan, and none of it has reached the corridors of a Catholic all-boys high school yet. A-han (Edward Chen) and Birdy (Tseng Jing-hua) meet in the school band, where Father Oliver (Fabio Grangeon) urges his students to profiter du moment, and are inseparable almost at once. The outside world keeps arriving anyway: the school begins admitting girls, both boys find themselves drawn to the same classmate, Ban Ban (Mimi Shao), and a national funeral supplies the pretext for a trip to Taipei together. What they cannot do is say what this is. Family expectation, the pull of a conventional path and the limits of what can be told to a confessor keep the question shut.

Naming is the film's persistent concern and 1987 is its instrument, the political opening letting Liu Kuang-hui measure how slowly private life follows public change. The film also carries sections set decades on, with Leon Dai and Jason Wang as the two men grown up, which makes memory part of its structure rather than an afterword. Liu built the screenplay by merging two projects he had already developed with his own life, after his old classmate Chu Yu-ning pushed him to tell it as his own story instead of hiding it inside somebody else's; Liu came out to his mother in early 2020, while the film was in production, decades after the events it depicts.

He cast for authenticity rather than name recognition, then set his leads homework before shooting: Happy Together and Blue Is the Warmest Colour, with Chen asked to work from Tony Leung and Tseng from Leslie Cheung. He also handed them his own love letters and diaries from the period so they could feel how restrained expression had to be at the time. The budget grew from NT$30 million to NT$70 million, much of the increase going on a Canadian leg, and a school in Taichung stood in for the campus. The 114-minute film premiered at the Osaka Asian Film Festival in March 2020, opened in Taiwan through Sony Pictures that September and went worldwide on Netflix in December. It became the first gay-themed film to pass NT$100 million at the Taiwanese box office and the highest-grossing LGBTQ film in the country's history, took Best Cinematography and Best Original Film Song at the 57th Golden Horse Awards, and Crowd Lu's theme later won Song of the Year at the Golden Melody Awards.