Bei qing cheng shi (1989)

Bei qing cheng shi (1989). Bei qing cheng shi: Directed by Hsiao-Hsien Hou. With Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Shu-Fen Hsin, Sung-Young Chen, Jack Kao. The story of a family embroiled in the "White Terror" that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s.

“Artistically, its greatness is not in dispute, but it is hard to overstate the importance of this film in political and social terms for Taiwan. The subject of the film, the February 28 Incident (the massacre of 20000 or more Taiwanese by Chinese Nationalist troops in 1947) had been completely been banned from public discussion by the now-defunct military government of Taiwan up until 1988 – only a year and a half before the film was released. To intervene so powerfully in a period of political and social change as Taiwanu0026#39;s democratic revolution in the late 1980s, makes the film as dramatic a re-configuring of a countryu0026#39;s cultural landscape as any film has ever achieved.”