Synopsis
The Time to Live and the Time to Die (童年往事, 1985) is Hou Hsiao-hsien's autobiographical drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The director turns his own childhood into film: a family that crossed from mainland China to southern Taiwan and never found its way back.
The boy is called Ah-ha. He grows up in provincial Fengshan, running with a street gang, picking fights, falling for a girl — while the adults around him quietly slip away one by one. First the father, then the mother, then the half-blind grandmother who keeps urging her grandson to walk with her back to China along a road that no longer exists. Hou films all of it in long, still takes, no melodrama: the camera simply watches time do its work.
Widely regarded as a peak of the Taiwanese New Wave, the film took the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1986 Berlin Film Festival. Slow, deeply personal cinema for viewers willing to sit inside a frame as long as life itself sits there. Stream The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) online on iFILM.
Starring
Comments 0