Capitol Hill is an unlikely springboard into filmmaking, right? Not for Taiwanese-American actor, writer, and producer Will Tiao.

“The joke is that D.C. is the ugly Hollywood,” the former U.S. congressional aide says with a laugh on the line from Philadelphia, where he’s promoting his feature Formosa Betrayed, which opens in Vancouver on Friday (April 9).

The political thriller (whose title uses the name European explorers called the Asian island commonly known as Taiwan) is a composite of several real-life events. It’s 1983, and an idealistic FBI agent (former Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek) is sent to help the Taiwanese government search for killers who fled to their island after murdering a Taiwanese-American professor in Chicago. In pursuit of the truth, he’s abetted by a Taiwanese activist, played by Tiao, who helps him understand Taiwan’s thorny political situation.

While working as an international economist during the Clinton years, Tiao took up acting classes for fun, which rapidly led to numerous roles. “I just got so lucky early on, D.C. being a very small market, particularly for Asian-Americans,” he says. “I was just booking left and right.” But when Tiao moved to L.A. in 2002, the cakewalk ended; he was suddenly up against ranks of more experienced Asian-American actors.

Rather than deterring him, the career culture shock prompted him to create his own opportunities by developing the story that would become Formosa Betrayed. “I was like, ”˜Wow, well, I guess I can sit there and audition for Chinese waiter number two over and over again with the same people, but it just doesn’t seem like it would be as much fun as basically starting my own project.’ ”

As a producer, he drew upon the pitching skills he had honed in Washington. During his internship with the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, he visited 300 congressional offices and “became very, very good at pitching Taiwan’s history in five minutes or less”.

His skills literally paid off. After touring North American cities, including Vancouver, he raised US$8 million for Formosa Betrayed, three-quarters of it from Taiwanese-American and -Canadian communities.

Needless to say, his political background also helped him delve into the depths of Taiwan’s layered history.

Although many North Americans may be aware that Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party (or Kuomintang) retreated from China to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War and purportedly brought democracy to Taiwan, Tiao says that this film “uncovers a kind of hidden history”. The film references the White Terror period, or the post–Second World War era, during which Taiwan was under martial law and thousands were arrested, tortured, and killed. The attempt to monitor and suppress dissent was suspected to have extended to the deaths of Pittsburgh professor Chen Wen-chen and San Francisco journalist Henry Liu. Tiao says that even his parents, who raised their Kansas-born children as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese”, were blacklisted.

Like many narratives from Asian North American communities, the film helps to break the silence shrouding a dark, painful history. Tiao mentions that many first-generation Taiwanese-Americans told a San Jose reporter that the film was cathartic for them. He adds, “I can’t tell you how many first-generation [people] have come up to me almost crying and basically saying, ”˜Thank you for telling our story.’ ”

With Tiao having formed the production company Formosa Films LLC, the story most likely does not end here.