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A Time to Live, a Time to die

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Un Temps pour vivre, un temps pour mourir

A Time to Live, a Time to Die

(Tong nien wang shi)

by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Taiwan

 

Un Temps pour vivre, un temps pour mourir

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

Script: Chu Tien-wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien

Cinematographer: Li Ping-pin

Editing: Wang Chi-yang

Sound: Hsin Chiang-sheng

Art Director: Lin Chung-wen

Music: Wu Chu-chu

Cast: Tien Feng, Mei Fang, Tang Ju-yun, Yu An-shun, Hsiao Ai, Hsin Shu Fen

Production: Central Motion Pictures

Distribution:
ASC Distribution
52 rue de Montreuil
75011 Paris
France
Tel: 0033 1.43.48.65.13
Fax: 0033 1.43.48.65.49
Mail: [email protected]
www.ascdistribution.com

Year: 1985

35 mm, Colour, 145 min
OV Mandarin with French Subtitles

The Ah-Hsiao family left continental China in 1948 to settle in a small city in south of Taiwan.

We are in 1957. The family members feel trapped and cut off from their roots when the communists win and transform Taiwan into a nationalist enclave at war with the continent. The film depicts the childhood of Ah-Hsiao (nicknamed Ah-ah by his grandmother) filled with the memory of his parents, his games and carefree life followed by an agitated adolescence and the first turmoil of love. It ends in the sixties with the disillusion and sorrow caused by his parents' death. His grand-mother dies in 1966. Ah-ah was her favourite grand-child.

Childhood memory was the subtitle of the last part of Hou Hsiao-hsien's autobiographical trilogy, after The Boys from Fengkuei and A Summer at Grandpa's.

 

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