Hou Hsiao-hsien revisits his childhood in classic of the Taiwanese New Wave
A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, October 3, $12, 7:00
Series runs through October 17
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwanese New Wave masterpiece, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, is a bittersweet, nostalgic look back at his childhood, after his father’s government job moves the family from Mainland China just as the Cultural Revolution is taking effect. The semiautobiographical film is seen through the eyes of young Ah-ha (You Anshun) as his father (Tien Feng) suffers ill health, his older brother gets harassed by a local gang, his mother (Mei Fang) tries to maintain the household, and his grandmother (Tang Ju-yun) keeps getting lost, being brought back by rickshaw drivers who demand ever-larger payments. The family lives in a Japanese-style home that is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, with Hou favoring long shots with limited camera movement, calmly shifting from scene to scene as Ah-ha grows up into a teenager (Hsiao Ai) and discovers a whole new set of problems and reality. The middle film in Hou’s coming-of-age trilogy (in between 1984’s A Summer at Grandpa’s and 1986’s Dust in the Wind), A Time to Live is a deeply personal, intimate, unforgettable story of life, death, and the bonds of family. The film is screening October 3 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Also like Life,” which continues through October 17 with such other Hou works as Daughter of the Nile, Dust in the Wind, The Sandwich Man, and A City of Sadness as well as such related films as Chen Kun-hou’s Growing Up and Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew.