Daughter of the Nile

Lin works in a fried chicken shop in Taipei and goes to night school. Her mother is dead, her father is a policeman posted out of town. Her older brother steals, her younger brother runs loose. The housework, the rent and everyone's problems have fallen to her. In her spare time she reads a manga she loves, about a girl lost in time on the banks of the Nile. The subject is not crime but the person watching a family come apart being unable to do anything. Lin knows where her brother is going and cannot stop him; the film does not build her as a rescuer and leaves her as a witness. The form is built on the city. Taipei at the end of the eighties: neon signs, fast food chains, disco music and newly built blocks. The texture is entirely unlike Hou Hsiao-hsien's rural films. It is among the earliest of his films set in the present. The title and the manga Lin reads are real: that Japanese comic was widely read in Taiwan at the time, and the comparison she draws with her own life comes from it. The film was hard to see for many years and was later restored. Yang Lin plays Lin and Jack Kao her brother, with Li Tian-Lu as the grandfather. Who it is for: viewers who like Taiwanese cinema and portraits of cities. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for events; the film is deliberately scattered and reaches no conclusion.