| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Saturday, February 27, 2010 | 1:00PM - 3:00PM | External Event, Town Hall, Innis College at the University of Toronto, 2 Sussex Avenue (south of Bloor at St. George) |
**Tickets for all screenings including opening night can be purchased 30 minutes before start time at the venue box office.**
City of Sadness (1989) | Hou Hsaio-hsien | 160 min.
I didn’t make A City of Sadness because I purposely wanted to open up old wounds’...but because I know that we have to face ourselves and our history if we are ever to understand who we are and where we’re going.” – Hou Hsiao-Hsien
“A family epic as expansive as The Godfather” (Godfrey Cheshire, Film Comment), the magnificent A City of Sadness is perhaps the finest film of Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien and a breakthrough both politically and popularly for the New Cinema when it was released. Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice in 1989, the film also gave Taiwanese films international currency it had never had before. Hou’s spans the four tumultuous years from 1945 and the Japanese surrender and 1949, when Chiang Kai Shek set up the Nationalist government on the island after fall of the mainland to the Communists. Hou narrates this violent and complex period through the perspective of one family: aging widower Lin, his four sons and their wives. The film treated a subject long excluded from any representation: the brutal repression of the Taiwanese by the Nationalist Chinese. It was only the international prestige A City of Sadness achieved was it shown in Taiwan.
Awards: 1989 Golden Horse Award, Best Actor (Sung Young Chen), Best Director (Hsiao-hsien Hou), Best Editing, and Best Film; 1989 Venice Film Festival, Golden Lion Award and UNESCO Award; 1990 Political Film Society, USA, Special Award; 1991 Kinema Junpo Award, Best Foreign Language Film; and 1991 Mainichi Film Concours, Best Foreign Language Film
Screening is following by a free lecture,
3:40 – 4:30 LECTURE
“Hou Hsiao-hsien and CITY OF SADNESS as Taiwan’s Cultural Ambassadors” Professor James Udden (Film Studies, Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania)
CITY OF SADNESS is distibuted by Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.