A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness is a 1989 Taiwanese historical drama film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It tells the story of a family embroiled in the tragic "White Terror" that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s, during which thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison. The film was the first to deal openly with the KMT's authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 turnover of Taiwan from Japan, and the first to depict the 228 Incident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred. A City of... Sadness was the first Chinese-language film to win the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. The film depicts the Lin family's experiences during the White Terror. The eldest brother Wen-heung is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, the middle brother Wen-leung suffers a traumatic brain injury in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother Wen-ching , who is both deaf and mute, hopes to flee to the mountains with his friend to fight in the anti-KMT resistance movement.
more