A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
Director: Edward Yang. 237 minutes. Taiwan. 1991. Languages: Mandarin and Taiwanese. Colour. 4K restoration
The film will be introduced by film producer Chuti Chang.
Screening as part of the Edward Yang Season presented with the support of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, the Taipei Representative Office in Ireland.
And a very special thanks to Janus Films and NG Yuk Lin.
All Edward Yang Season’s film notes are taken from the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, the Film Lincoln Centre and Janus Films.
Yang deeply personal epic, A Brighter Summer Day immortalises the moment when teen pop culture went global, forging an effervescent but lasting bridge between East and West. Set in the early sixties in Taiwan and 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 (Chen Chang, in his first role years before appearing in Happy Together and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) from innocence to juvenile delinquency, and is set against a simmering backdrop of restless youth, rock and roll, and political turmoil.