Cape No. 7

When his music career fails, Aga returns from Taipei to his home town of Hengchun and takes work as a postman. There is one package he cannot deliver: seven letters written by a Japanese teacher forced to leave Taiwan in 1945 to the woman he left behind, and never sent. The address no longer exists. At the same time the town needs a local warm-up band for a Japanese singer's concert, and Aga is pushed into it. The band is six people who do not know each other. Wei Te-sheng runs two times side by side: an incompetent band in the present and letters from sixty years earlier. The narrative leaves Taiwan's relationship with the Japanese colonial period somewhere unresolved and mixed with nostalgia. The film was an unexpected box-office success in Taiwan and became the highest-grossing domestic film there. That success revived interest in local cinema. Who it's for: Viewers who like Taiwanese cinema, band-forming stories, and two-timeline narratives. Who it's not for: It runs long and there are many supporting characters. The emotional register of the letters may also be too much for some.