A Brighter Summer Day

A four-hour film set in Taipei in the early 1960s. Xiao Si'r is a boy at night school. His family came from the mainland; his father, who works for the government, is permanently uneasy and the household is permanently between moves. There are gangs at school. The students are divided by neighbourhood, carry knives, and the accounts between them never close. Xiao Si'r drifts into that arrangement. At the same time he meets a girl named Ming; she is a gang leader's girlfriend and her position is unclear. Behind it stands the condition of a country. The families from the mainland think they are there temporarily, the political pressure of the period reaches into the houses, and the interrogation of the father is among the film's most shattering passages. The narrative comes out of a real event: a murder committed by a student in the early 1960s that shook the country. The form is patient. The scenes are long, there is very little light and the camera rarely comes close; the passages lit by a torch in the dark became the film's signature. Chang Chen, then a child, is in the lead; his father is played by his real father. Edward Yang directed. One of cinema's most-cited works for anyone who likes Asian cinema and large-scale social storytelling. For a viewer who wants something short, the film runs four hours and carries dozens of characters.