Goodbye, Dragon Inn

synopsis

A cinephilic farewell letter, which received the Critics' Choice Award at Venice, invites you to the last screening before the final closing of a cinema in Taipei. The building was already featured in Tsai's What Time Is It There?, but this time it plays the lead role. However, its visitors didn't come for Kim Hu's 1967 wuxia film Dragon Inn, a reminder of the golden era of Taiwanese cinema. The darkened room is a shelter from the rain, a haven of memories and a place of amorous encounters and courtship. The homoerotic stuffiness, the stony, far-away faces, the food warmer and the ashtray full of cigarettes remind us of the world between the living and the dead. A nostalgic sigh for the end of the era of single-screen cinemas speaks of barriers, loneliness, alienation and loss.

“Happiness and sadness are really parts of the same thing, so often the absurdity of a situation makes it seem funny, but the core of the moment is really quite sad.”

Source: Reverse Shot

biography

Tsai Ming-liang (1957) is a Malaysian native who lives and works in Taiwan. Together with Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien, he is a leading representative of the Taiwanese New Wave. His work has features of slow cinema, conceptual art and performance art and deals with themes of loneliness, time and memory. His second feature, Vive L'Amour (1994), won the Golden Lion at Venice. The River (1997) won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and The Wayward Cloud (2005) competed there.

more about film

director:	Tsai Ming-liang
producer:	Hung-Chih Liang, Vincent Wang