Screenwriter · Actor

Wu Nien-jen

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

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.

13:00

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.

13:00

Yi Yi

Edward Yang · 2000

Edward Yang’s 2000 Taiwanese drama follows the Jian family in Taipei over several months of quiet upheaval: a comatose grandmother, a father’s unresolved past, a daughter’s first heartbreak, a son’s search for meaning through photography. Shot in Mandarin, it unfolds with patient realism, refusing exposition or climax in favour of emotional fidelity. Its 173-minute runtime is structural, not indulgent—each scene a deliberate unit in a sequence built on duration, silence, and the asymmetry of perception across generations.