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Editor · Producer

Liao Ching-sung

6: briefs
13:00: average
78 min: in total

On film.briefs6

A City of Sadness

Hou Hsiao-Hsien · 1989

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1989 Golden Lion winner follows a Taiwanese family in Jiufen during the turbulent years after Japan’s surrender, the February 28 Incident, and the onset of the White Terror. Using long takes, multilingual dialogue, and a muted, observational style, it renders political trauma through domestic detail — photographs, trains, staircases, silences — rather than exposition or polemic. Starring Tony Leung, Li Tian-lu, and Jack Kao, it is the first Taiwanese film to confront state violence openly, and remains a landmark of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement.

Dust in the Wind

Hou Hsiao-Hsien · 1986

Dust in the Wind (1986), directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, follows Ah Yuan and Ah Yun, childhood sweethearts from Jiufen, Taiwan, as they move separately to Taipei in the early 1970s. Their relationship unravels not through conflict but through the quiet pressures of urban life, military service, and unspoken expectations. Shot in Taiwanese Hokkien with restrained performances and patient cinematography by Mark Lee Ping Bin, the film observes migration, labour, and memory as embodied, everyday facts — not dramatic events.

Good Men, Good Women

Hou Hsiao-Hsien · 1995

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1995 drama interweaves the true story of resistance activist Chiang Bi-yu with the contemporary rehearsal process of an actress playing her. Shot in Taiwanese Hokkien with restrained cinematography and elliptical editing, it explores memory, gender, and political erasure across three temporal layers — not to resolve history, but to inhabit its lingering weight.

Millennium Mambo

Hou Hsiao-Hsien · 2001

Millennium Mambo is a 2001 Taiwanese arthouse romance directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, following Vicky (Shu Qi) as she reflects on her early twenties in Taipei at the turn of the millennium. Structured as a hazy, non-linear recollection, it prioritises atmosphere over exposition — lingering on neon-lit bars, subway platforms, and quiet apartments — with Shu Qi’s restrained performance and Mark Lee Ping Bin’s soft-focus cinematography anchoring its meditative pace. Awarded the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes for sound design, it is a study in temporal drift, where romance serves less as plot than as ambient pressure.

The Assassin

Hou Hsiao-Hsien · 2015

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2015 wuxia film, set in the Tang dynasty, follows an assassin ordered to kill her cousin and former betrothed. Loosely based on a ninth-century story, it replaces genre conventions with austere composition, elliptical storytelling and profound stillness. Shot by Mark Lee Ping Bin and scored by Lim Giong, it won the Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film and Best Director at Cannes.

The Terrorizers

Edward Yang · 1986

A 1986 Taiwanese drama by Edward Yang, The Terrorizers traces intersecting lives in Taipei — a depressed novelist, a photographer obsessed with a stranger, a hospital worker unraveling professionally and personally — bound by miscommunication, mediated images, and unspoken grief. Its structure resists resolution, favouring spatial and temporal disorientation over narrative closure.