Taipei Story

Taipei Story is a 1985 Taiwanese film directed by Edward Yang — his second full-length feature film and third overall. The film stars Hou Hsiao-hsien and singer Tsai Chin to depict the grinding relationship of Ah-lung and Ah-chen, who have known each other since childhood in Taipei. It is doomed to fail because Ah-lung cannot forget about the past while Ah-chen is eager to embrace the future as Taipei undergoes modernization and globalization. Taipei Story is one of the representative films of the New Taiwanese Cinema. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 38th Locarno Film Festival in 1985. In the United States, Janus Films gave a limited release of the film's 4K restoration, done by the World Cinema Project, on March 17, 2017. Title The literal meaning of the Chinese title, Qing Mei Zhu Ma is a Chinese idiom, "green plums and a bamboo horse". It alludes to an 8th-century poem by Li Bai, and is used to refer to a childhood sweetheart. The English title Taipei Story marks the theme of the failed love story: the Taipei City, which is the common theme in all of Edward Yang’s films, including notably The Terrorizers (恐怖份子; 1986) and A One and A Two (一一; 2000).