A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness is a historical drama film by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It tells the story of a family embroiled in the tragic "White Terror" that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s, during which thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison.

The film was the first to deal openly with the KMT's authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 turnover of Taiwan from Japan, and the first to depict the 228 Incident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred.

The film is regarded as the first installment in a trilogy of films that deal with Taiwanese history, which also includes '''' and ''Good Men, Good Women'' .

Plot

The film depicts one family's experiences during the White Terror. The eldest brother is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, the middle brother is driven insane in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother Lin Wen-Ch'ing 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.

Awards

The film won the Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The film also revived the ghost town of Jioufen, where it was set.