Taipei Story

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In a Taipei expanding faster than its inhabitants can comprehend, Ah-chen and Ah-lung are losing their grip on one another. She is an ambitious career woman with her sights set on the West; he is a former baseball star tethered to his family’s fading textile business. While the world around them hurtles forward, their relationship slowly grinds to a halt.

Director Edward Yang maps this alienation within the concrete jungle with the precision of an architect. Much like the characters of Antonioni, Ah-chen and Ah-lung are swallowed by their environment: the grey high-rises and the monotony of modern life leave no room for nostalgia or dreams. Here, Taipei is a labyrinth where every attempt to escape only pushes them deeper into a melancholic isolation.

TAIPEI STORY is a haunting elegy for a city and its people, caught between a forgotten past and a hollow future. Featuring a rare on-screen performance by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang captures the cost of modernization and the fragility of everyday life. A timeless masterpiece that, forty years on, has lost none of its resonance.

TAIPEI STORY was restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

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Edward Yang TW, 1985, 119 min

Cast Tsai Chin, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu Nien-jen

Spoken language Min Nan, Mandarin, Hokkien

Subtitles English