The Cinematheque

“A vast fresco crowded with warmth, humour, violence, and a wealth of intimate detail. For once, ​‘masterpiece’ seems the appropriate word.”

Tony Rayns, VIFF

A work of grand scale and ambitious achievement, A Brighter Summer Day is Edward Yang’s consensus masterwork. Inspired in part by an actual murder case that rocked Taiwan, and set to a jukebox soundtrack of Western pop songs (the title is a mondegreen of lyrics in Elvis’s ​“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”), Yang’s richly detailed opus chronicles the coming-of-age of young Xiao S’ir, son of a stern civil servant, as he comes into the orbit of a local youth gang and falls in love with the girlfriend of the gang’s gone-into-hiding leader. The film’s sociopolitical milieu is an uneasy Taiwan teeming with anti-communist immigrants from the mainland, while its younger generation falls increasingly under the sway of American culture. Three years in the making, and featuring over a hundred speaking parts, A Brighter Summer Day is one of contemporary cinema’s most cherished works and arguably the apex of New Taiwanese Cinema.

In Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Hokkien with English subtitles

“A nocturnal masterpiece … At once coolly distanced and desperately romantic.”

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“Probably the greatest Taiwanese film ever made.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum