A Borrowed Life · reception & legacy

1995 · Wu Nien-jen

How A Borrowed Life has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A festival darling on release — grand prize at Torino, prizes at Thessaloniki and Singapore — it then spent decades almost impossible to see with English subtitles, becoming a whispered-about grail until restoration finally put it back in circulation for a new wave of admirers.

What's debated

The perennial cinephile gripe: how can a film Scorsese ranks among the decade's best have been this hard to actually watch — and why isn't Wu the director canonized like the Hou and Yang films he wrote?

Its footprint

For years it lived mostly as a legend on Martin Scorsese's list of his favorite 1990s films — the entry people hadn't seen — while its title 'Dou-san' (Japanese for 'father') became shorthand for Taiwan's entire Japanese-colonial generation.

Where it stands

A revered deep cut of Taiwan New Cinema — the 'you must track this down' film from the movement's great screenwriter, now climbing the canon as it becomes seeable again.

★ Did you know? Martin Scorsese named A Borrowed Life one of his ten favorite films of the 1990s (in his famous exchange with Roger Ebert), despite the film being barely distributed in the US — and its director, Wu Nien-jen, is the same man who later played the lead, NJ, in Edward Yang's Yi Yi.