(童年往事)
Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien
138 minutes
In Mandarin, Hakka, Taiwanese Minnan
With English subtitles
 
Hou Hsiao-Hsien has become one of Asia's most important and groundbreaking film directors. This is an earlier movie by him, and the one that first got him international acclaim, but it is also vastly different from some of the movies he would make later in his life that have a feverish neon-drenched fauvist mood to them (Millennium Mambo). This movie is, on the other hand, is outrageously calm… but it's just as engaging. 

What is the film about? It's clearly director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's memories of his own childhood from 1947 to 1965 when his family moved from mainland China to Taiwan, and how the family was totally cut off from the world they knew. It's about his relationship to his father, about growing up as a foreigner in Taiwan, about street gangs and kids, it's about love and death. But more than that, it is actually about embracing details and intimacy. It's not a sentimental journey, more of an illuminated meditation. The pace of the film is pitch-perfect, capturing the real speed of life without being rushed or slowed down… giving us the time and space to observe the events that unfold with our own mind and soul.

This movie mixes life and death in an extraordinary way. It shows us how most movies gloss over real-life for the sake of easy stereotypes or a catchy story... and what we lose in the process—it has the power to make us rethink all the movies that are in the cinema these days. As Hsiao-Hsien's film moves from event to event, no matter how emotionally dramatic the events themselves are, the movie itself remains unflinching and records everything as a part of life. Strangely, this is what makes the film glow. 

In a way, it's also about a sense of community, and the radical changes China was going through after the war. What is being recorded isn't just a personal journey, but also history itself, and over the course of the 18 years depicted in this story we see Taiwan changing quickly - as electricity is introduced, and automobiles start to fill the streets. It captures a time and place that has been run over by progress, and no longer exists. 

This film is radically different from anything that would come out of the west, and of course what I'm talking about is not just a different filmmaking style, but a different way of seeing life. The cinematography is incandescent in a sublime way, both detached and yet poetically engaged. That's what makes the film profound, and offers us a radical alternative. It's deeply connected to the heartbeat of life, in a way that you won't see in cinema these days.  When film director Paul Schrader was young, he wrote a book about transcendental cinema, and he argued certain movies knock cinema to another level... and this film can also be seen in this way. A stunner, but in the most disarming way possible.