Movies - A City of Sadness

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	Movies - A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness (悲情城市) is a 1989 film by Hou Hsiao-hsien about a family embroiled in the tragic "White Terror" wrought by the Kuomintang (KMT) on the Taiwanese people when they began to arrive from mainland China in the late-1940s.

During the White Terror Era (白色恐怖時代), from 1947-1987, thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison by the KMT. The film is considered historic in Taiwan because it was the first movie to deal openly with the KMT's authoritarian misdeeds during its takeover of Taiwan beginning in 1947.

In the course of the film's narrative the eldest brother is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, one of the middle brothers is driven insane in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) 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 Ching-wen, is alive to tell (in writing) the story of his family's destruction.

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

Category:1989 films Category:Taiwanese films

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