Synopsis
A City of Sadness (1989) is a historical drama by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Tony Leung Chiu-wai stars as a deaf-mute photographer who watches, in silence, as the world around his family comes apart.
The story spans four years, from the end of Japanese rule to the arrival of the Kuomintang. Fate scatters the four Lin brothers: one runs a tavern, one vanishes in the war, one loses his mind, and the youngest — the photographer — drifts toward friends in the underground. Behind them sits the thing Taiwan was forbidden to name aloud for half a century: the killings of early 1947 and the long years of repression that followed.
This was the first Taiwanese film to take the Golden Lion at Venice, and it pushed Taiwan's new cinema onto the world stage. Hou shoots in long, still, unhurried takes, and the quiet makes the grief land harder than any shouting could. For viewers ready to sit with slow, patient art-house filmmaking, it opens a whole chapter of buried history. Stream A City of Sadness (1989) online on iFILM.
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