Taiwan cinema masterpiece A City of Sadness’s 4K restoration will be screened during the 13th Beijing International Film Festival as a tribute.
Booking goes on sales today and all screenings were sold out within 6 seconds. The most expensive ticket in auction currently is around £800 each.
This will be the first time ever for this controversial film to be screened in mainland China, hence, a mainland China Premiere, a 34-year delay but a historic progress.
A City of Sadness (悲情城市) is a 1989 Taiwanese historical drama directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It tells the story of a family embroiled in the “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 and recent emigres from the Mainland were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison. The film was the first to deal openly with the KMT’s authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 takeover of Taiwan, which had been relinquished following Japan’s defeat in World War II, and the first to depict the February 28 Incident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred by the KMT.
