A City of Sadness

A City of Sadness Chinese pinyin biqng chngsh is a 1989 Taiwanese historical drama film directed by Hou HsiaoHsien. It tells the story of a family embroiled in the tragic White Terror that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government KMT after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s, during which thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, andor sent to prison. The film was the first to deal openly with the KMTs authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 takeover of Taiwan, which had been restored to China following Japans defeat in WWII, and the first to depict the FebruaryIncident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred.

The film depicts the Lin familys experiences during the FebruaryIncident. The eldest brother Wenheung Sung Young Chen is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, the middle brother Wenleung Jack Kao suffers a traumatic brain injury in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother Wenching Tony Leung Chiu Wai, who is both deaf and mute, hopes to flee to the mountains with his friend to fight in the antiKMT resistance movement. By the end of the film even the photographer Wenching has been arrested by the authorities, leaving only his wife to tell the story of the familys destruction.Wenchings deafness began as an expedient way to disguise Tony Leungs inability to speak Taiwanese or Japanesethe language taught in Taiwans schools during the 51year Japanese rule, but wound up being an effective means to demonstrate the brutal insensitivity of Chen Yis ROC administration. ........

Source: Wikipedia