In Hou’s autobiographical masterpiece—the second installment in his groundbreaking trilogy of coming-of-age stories—the director revisits the small-town landscapes of his youth, utilizing his trademark long shots to capture them with disarming intimacy. Chronicling a family’s struggle to acclimate to life in Taiwan in the aftermath of the
Chinese Revolution, the film is haunted by a heightened sense of time’s passage, and by the specter of a distant, irretrievable homeland. A selection of the New York Film Festival 1985.