A City of Sadness 悲情城市 (1989): The Movie Where a Deaf-Mute Photographer Watches History Devour His Family and the Massacre Happens Off-Screen
First, take a look at the trailer.
The Movie About a Massacre That Never Shows You the Massacre
Here is the oddest thing about A City of Sadness 悲情城市 (1989): it is widely described as the film that broke Taiwan's most forbidden subject — the February 28 Incident of 1947, when Kuomintang troops killed thousands of Taiwanese civilians — and yet the massacre is never once shown on screen. No mobs. No firing squads. No corpses in the street.
What you get instead is a family in a mountain mining town: four brothers, a bar called "Little Shanghai," a new baby, a wedding, a photograph. And then, one by one, the men stop coming home.
That restraint is exactly why the film worked. Had Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) shot the atrocity head-on, the authorities would almost certainly have cut it. Instead he let the silence do the accusing — and the world's oldest film festival handed him its top prize, which made the film politically untouchable at home. Today it holds 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (from 13 critic reviews), 7.7/10 on IMDb from more than 7,000 users, 4.12 out of 5 on Letterboxd from roughly 18,000 ratings, and 9.0 on Douban. In 2022 the Busan International Film Festival's poll of the 100 greatest Asian films put it at No. 1.
What Is It About?
The film opens on 15 August 1945, with Emperor Hirohito's voice on the radio announcing Japan's unconditional surrender. After fifty years of Japanese colonial rule, Taiwan is handed to the Republic of China. In the coastal town of Keelung, the Lin family is reopening its nightclub and gambling house — "Little Shanghai" — run by the eldest brother, Wen-hsiung (Chen Sung-young). The same night, a young nurse named Hinomi (Hsin Shu-fen) arrives at the Jinguashi Miners' Hospital, where her brother Hinoe has arranged for a friend to meet her.
That friend is Wen-ching (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), the fourth Lin brother, a photographer who was deafened by a childhood accident. He speaks almost nothing in the entire film; he communicates by scribbling on paper. It is one of the great quiet performances in Asian cinema, and it quietly solved a casting problem too: Leung came from Hong Kong and did not natively speak the Taiwanese Hokkien the household runs on, so making the character mute turned a liability into the film's emotional centre.
The second brother has vanished in the Philippines, conscripted as a doctor and never heard from again — he is talked about constantly and never seen, one of Hou's cruellest jokes. The third, Wen-liang (Jack Kao), comes home shell-shocked from serving in the Japanese army, then falls in with Shanghainese gangsters, gets denounced as a Japanese collaborator, and is beaten so badly in prison that he comes out brain-damaged. The eldest tries to hold the family and the business together and is gunned down in a gambling house over a moment of revenge.
And through it all, the year 1947 arrives. On 27 February, agents of the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau confiscate a Taipei cigarette vendor's stock and beat her over the head with a pistol; a bystander is shot; the next day the city erupts. Governor Chen Yi declares martial law and calls in troops from the mainland. Estimates of the dead run from ten thousand to well over twenty thousand. Taiwan would remain under martial law for thirty-eight years — the era now called the White Terror.
Wen-ching is arrested, released, and arrested again. Hinomi's brother joins a guerrilla group in the mountains and is executed with almost all of it. The film's final movement is not a battle but a dinner table: the women, the children, the brain-damaged brother and the baby, eating while the men are gone.
The Team and the Cast
- Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien — already internationally known for A Time to Live and a Time to Die and Dust in the Wind; this was his first film to tackle national history directly.
- Screenplay: Wu Nien-jen and Chu T'ien-wen — Wu would become one of Taiwan's most important novelists and later appeared as the lead in Edward Yang's Yi Yi.
- Producer: Chiu Fu-sheng.
- Cinematography: Chen Hwai-en — the long-take, deep-focus, fixed-frame style that critics call "Hou's gaze from the doorway."
- Editing: Liao Ching-sung.
- Music: the Japanese electronic duo S.E.N.S., whose piano-and-strings theme carries the film's melodic grief; the soundtrack also folds in Japanese school songs, a German folk melody, and the wartime Chinese song Song of Exile.
- Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Chen Sung-young, Hsin Shu-fen, Jack Kao, Li Tian-lu (as the patriarch Ah-lu), Wu Yi-fang.
Two behind-the-scenes habits explain why the performances feel so unacted. Starting with this film, Hou began throwing the script away on set: he would describe a character's life to non-professional actors rather than hand them dialogue, and he would sometimes call "rehearsal" while actually rolling, catching people at their most relaxed. Chen Sung-young — a gravel-voiced character actor, not a star — won Best Actor at the Golden Horse Awards that way, and Hou won Best Director.
The film was shot in Jiufen and Jinguashi, former gold-mining towns in the hills above Keelung. It made them famous all over again; the "second prosperity" of Jiufen, now a tourist magnet, is usually traced to this movie.
The Numbers, the Prizes, and the Politics
- Runtime: 157 minutes. Country: Taiwan. Languages: Taiwanese Hokkien, Mandarin, Japanese, Cantonese and Shanghainese — a deliberate Babel, because Taiwan in 1945–49 genuinely was one.
- Premiere: Venice, September 1989. Taiwan release: 21 October 1989. Hong Kong release: 21 December 1989.
- Venice, 46th edition: Golden Lion for Best Film, plus the UNESCO Award and the Special Golden Ciak — the first Taiwanese film ever to take a top prize at Cannes, Venice or Berlin.
- Golden Horse Awards, 26th (1989): Best Director (Hou Hsiao-hsien) and Best Leading Actor (Chen Sung-young); nominated for Best Feature Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing.
- Oscars: submitted by Taiwan for Best Foreign Language Film at the 62nd Academy Awards; not accepted as a nominee.
- Also: Best Foreign Language Film at Japan's Kinema Junpo Awards and Mainichi Film Concours (1991); a Special Award from the US Political Film Society (1990); nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1991 Independent Spirit Awards.
- Box office: made on a reported budget of NT$19 million, it took in roughly NT$80 million in Taiwan, with about NT$66 million of that in Taipei alone and around 600,000 admissions there — a huge number for a 157-minute art film, and proof that the public was hungry to talk about what had been unspeakable.
- The politics were not abstract: at Venice, Chinese pressure meant Taiwan's flag could not be flown outside the festival venue alongside the other competing nations — an empty flagpole on the most famous night in Taiwanese film history. Many believe the Golden Lion is precisely why the film was neither banned nor cut at home.
- Restoration: a 4K digitally restored version returned to Taiwanese cinemas on 24 February 2023, thirty-three years after the original release, with a premiere on 14 February attended by Hou's cast and crew — Tony Leung among them. It then played the 47th Hong Kong International Film Festival before a Hong Kong theatrical run from 27 April 2023, and screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival that year. The 2023 re-release carried a tagline that doubles as the film's whole thesis: a story you had never heard, and had never dared to tell.
A City of Sadness is the first part of what scholars call Hou's Taiwan Trilogy, followed by The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995).
Why It Matters
Before 1989 the February 28 Incident was not taught, not discussed, and not filmed. Martial law had only been lifted in 1987. This was the first film or television work in Taiwan to go near it — and it did so in a way no censor could easily cut, because the violence happens off in another room while the camera stays with the family.
That strategy turned out to be more durable than any polemic. Hou's refusal to point at villains, his habit of framing scenes from a doorway as if the camera were a polite guest, and his insistence on domestic detail — the baby, the dishes, the birthday banquet — mean the film still plays as something other than a history lesson. You are not being instructed about 1947. You are watching a household lose its men.
It also changed the geography of Chinese-language cinema. The Golden Lion gave credibility and a business model to the Taiwanese New Cinema movement that had begun in 1982, and it opened the festival route that a whole generation — Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang — would walk in the 1990s. Western critics caught up over time: Richard Brody in The New Yorker called it "the birth of a nation at the price of a family's dissolution"; Dave Kehr in the Chicago Tribune gave it four stars and wrote that it "will be watched as long as there are people who care about the movies as an art." Jonathan Rosenbaum went further and called it "one of the supreme masterworks of the contemporary cinema."
And there is the odd afterlife of Tony Leung Chiu-wai's performance. Two years later the same actor would be lighting cigarettes in Days of Being Wild and, a decade on, whispering into a wall in In the Mood for Love. Here he has almost no dialogue at all, and he is unforgettable. If you want a single argument for why the wuxia blockbusters only tell half the story of Chinese-language film, it is this: the best performance of Leung's career may be the one where he never says a word.
Final Thought
A City of Sadness asks you to sit still for two hours and thirty-seven minutes and accept that the loudest events in a life are the ones you never see. Hou Hsiao-hsien trusts that a dinner table with empty chairs is more devastating than a battlefield, and — 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a Golden Lion, and the top slot on Busan's list of the greatest Asian films later — he was right.
It is also, quietly, one of the most rewatchable "important" films ever made, because it is not really about politics. It is about a woman writing notes to a man who cannot hear, in a room where a baby is sleeping, while outside the window a country is being changed by force.
Have you seen it — and if you have, did the ending land for you as grief, or as survival? Tell me in the comments; I read every one.
Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬
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