A Brighter Summer Day

Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film. Set in the early sixties in Taiwan, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the nation. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centres on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager (Chang Chen in his first role) from innocence to juvenile delinquency, and is set against a simmering backdrop of restless youth, rock and roll, and political turmoil.

Staff Pick: Casey

Superior even to [Yang’s] Yi Yi, it has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other 90s film… This is a film about alienated identities in a country undergoing a profound existential crisis — a Rebel Without a Cause with much of the same nocturnal lyricism and cosmic despair. Notwithstanding the masterpieces of Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese new wave starts here.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

A work of absolute mastery. Its imaginative authority and the scale of its achieved ambition make it not just a wonderful movie but also an essential piece of modern cinema.

AO Scott, New York Times

Yang’s film doesn’t waste a single second of its four hours, and taken as a whole, reveals a beautiful, intricate, masterful tapestry that is as accomplished in its grand, quiet way as is The Godfather trilogy.

Jeffrey Anderson, Combustile Celluloid

A Brighter Summer Day (the English title comes from Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”) is an elegy to the ideals and mistakes of youth, an analysis of the vanities of the male ego, and a view of a generation painfully facing the limitations of tradition, the constraints of political oppression, and the demands of the modern world.

David Bordwell

Media Partner