Hill of No Return

The 1920s, Taiwan under Japanese rule. Chu and Wei run away from the farm where they work and go to the gold mine at Jiufen, meaning to earn money and buy land of their own. How things work at the mine is clear enough: the Japanese company earns and the worker leaves what he earns back in the same town straight away. There is also a brothel in the town, where a sick young woman brought from Japan is working. Wang Tung's film is the last part of his trilogy about Taiwanese peasants under the Japanese occupation. It runs a hundred and seventy-five minutes and builds its weight without hurrying; comic sections stand next to very harsh ones. The telling shows colonialism not through a slogan but through daily arithmetic: who owes whom how much, who takes what from whom. The film won best picture, best director and best screenplay at the Golden Horse awards in 1992.