The premiere of Wellington film maker Robin Greenberg's documentary Free China Junk was held at the Film Archive in association with the National Press Club. The documentary brings to light a near-forgotten episode in Pacific navigation that took place in the same era as Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki voyage and which in its own way was just as significant.

Instead of a raft, though, this voyage was in a junk and took its crew from Taiwan to San Francisco. Sailing buffs will be interested in the technicalities of a junk and its performance on such a long voyage and crewed by young men whose main ambition was to reach the United States.

The cause of the voyage was picaresque in that the youths saw their opportunity in entering the junk in an Americas Cup style race, this one a long distance one based in San Francisco. This was seized upon as an opportunity for national prominence by the fledgling island nation of Formosa, by now Taiwan, in the same way that sail races and ball games are similarly adopted by other governments in other countries as metaphors for wider national potential and achievement.

Conspiracy buffs meanwhile will find themselves intrigued by the precise role of the US consular official who piloted the scheme through bureaucratic rapids revolving around the possibility of the junk Free China sinking, and thus engendering the opposite nationalistic effect of the one intended.

In the event, the official quite literally saw the voyage through by becoming one of the crew and taking the Super 8 footage of the voyage with its adventures and misadventures, on stock deliberately supplied by the CIA.

US-born Greenberg first met Loo-Chi Hu, one of these adventurers, in Christchurch where the crew man still lives to this day. Greenberg's resulting film Huloo became the foundation of Free China Junk because it led her to Calvin Mehlert, the young American vice-consul who had issued the US visas that allowed the voyagers to set foot in the US, and who then asked to join and film the voyage. He is still living in San Francisco.

Still spry, and having achieved their wish of actually living in the United States, or gathering enough applied experience there to venture still further afield, the Taiwanese junk crew  have an intriguing story to tell about long haul Pacific sail boat voyaging. The film is also an engaging snapshot of East-West attitudes during the height of the Cold War. Film producer Robin Greenberg (purple scarf) is photographed at the premiere with the projects director of the Film Archive, Diane McAllen.