Sightlines · a viewing thread

Sinophone Slow Cinema

A run of Chinese-language films — Taiwan's New Wave and its mainland and Bi Gan heirs — where time pools and city, family, and memory recur; watch them near each other, from A Brighter Summer Day to An Elephant Sitting Still, for how they rhyme on drift and the weight of the past.

This is film-school canon more than crowd favorite: mostly demanding, several very long, a few genuinely devastating, so save them for unhurried evenings — though Yi Yi and Better Days are the gentler doors in.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Yi Yi (2000)
Taipei Story (1985)
A City of Sadness (1989)
Millennium Mambo (2001)
What Time Is It There? (2001)
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
Better Days (2019)
Kaili Blues (2016)
Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)
An Elephant Sitting Still (2018)
The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) — The Hou Hsiao-hsien you forgot you'd saved — his autobiographical account of a mainland family settling into a southern Taiwan town rhymes exactly with A City of Sadness and A Brighter Summer Day on childhood watched through the long, patient take.
Dust in the Wind (1986) — If Taipei Story and Yi Yi landed, this is the under-seen Hou to finally pull down — young love adrift from a mining town to Taipei, held at his signature contemplative distance.
Flowers of Shanghai (1998) — The Hou you never got to: an entire film pooling inside candlelit 1880s Shanghai flower houses, all languorous long takes and dissolving time — the most formally hypnotic thing near Raise the Red Lantern.
Rebels of the Neon God (1994) — The overlooked Tsai Ming-liang that seeds What Time Is It There? — four youths barely connecting across neon Taipei, the same drift and urban loneliness in an earlier, rawer key.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) — Almost wordless, set across one rainy last night in a dying Taipei movie palace, this Tsai is the purest slow-cinema meditation on memory and cinema itself — the deep cut that belongs beside What Time Is It There?
Platform (2001) — The Jia Zhangke this thread is missing — a provincial song-and-dance troupe carried across a whole privatizing decade in long, dusty takes, mainland slow cinema's answer to Yi Yi's sweep of time.
So Long, My Son (2019) — The three-hour, time-folding one you kept meaning to watch — two couples sundered by a child's death across decades of Chinese history, as devastating and elliptical as An Elephant Sitting Still.
A Sun (2019) — The contemporary Taiwanese family drama that rhymes with Yi Yi's quiet reckonings — a Taipei household coming apart across years around a son sent to juvenile detention.
In the Heat of the Sun (1994) — The half-remembered coming-of-age you'd forgotten — Cultural Revolution Beijing seen through teenage boys running wild, a sun-hazed memory piece that rhymes with A Brighter Summer Day on youth and the unreliable past.
To Live (1994) — The Zhang Yimou beyond Raise the Red Lantern to finally pull down — one family battered across civil war and Cultural Revolution, the thread's clearest study of history's weight pressing on the ordinary.
2046 (2004) — If Millennium Mambo's neon drift landed, this is the Wong Kar-wai companion waiting — a writer cycling through 1960s Hong Kong affairs he can't hold, all longing and dissolving time, the register Long Day's Journey later borrows.
Big World (2024) — The recent one that rhymes with Yi Yi and the mainland realist heirs on family and city — a humid Changsha summer where time pools around one household organized entirely around a young man's care, tender rather than devastating, a gentler door into this run.