A City of Sadness
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A City of Sadness (Chinese: 悲情城市; pinyin: bēiqíng chéngshì) is a 1989 film by Hou Hsiao-hsien about a family embroiled in the tragic "White Terror" wrought by the Kuomintang (KMT) on the Taiwanese people when they began to arrive from mainland China in the late-1940s.
During the White Terror Era (白色恐怖時代), from 1949-1987, thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison by the KMT. The film is considered historic in Taiwan because it was the first movie to touch on the 228 Incident of 1947 and deal openly with the KMT's authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 takeover of Taiwan from Japan.
In the course of the film's narrative the eldest brother is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, one of the middle brothers is driven insane in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother Lin Wen-Ch'ing (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) is a mute who wants to flee to the mountains with his friends to fight in the anti-KMT resistance movement. By the end of the film only the youngest brother, the photographer Wen-Ch'ing, is alive to tell (in writing) the story of his family's destruction.
The film won the Golden Lion in the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The film also revived the ghost town of Jioufen, where the film was set in.
