Wan Jen

Two friends who haven't seen each other for thirteen years reunite. One is a successful concert pianist just back from a European tour and the other has just started a new business.

Composed of three separate stories, the film vividly portrays Taiwan during the cold war period when the country developed its economy with help from the United States.

The startling contrast between old and new Taiwan is the subject of Wan Jen's epic of traditional identities coming into conflict with an urban life, emphasizing the situation of women.

Taiwanese comedy film.

A young man from the country comes to Taipei to search for his sister from whom he has heard nothing during the past year. Beginning in a tenement slum, the young man travels through the city's lowlife, where street hustlers sell fake Rolex watches and other contraband, gangs fight each other, and the ubiquitous sex businesses ply their trade. The young man befriends a rich teenage girl and a young prostitute as he and a hustler who knew his sister search for her through a trail of clues leading to restaurants, dance joints, and brothels.

After her six year old son is kidnapped, a successful fashion designer must work with a detective to clear up the terrifying mystery and get her son back.

At an old age, a former political prisoner is determined to find out where his fellow sufferers have laid since their secret execution, while Taiwan embarks on a tumultuous path of democratization.

A young man is pulled into crime and then murder. He falls in love with a beautiful young prostitute who sells herself to a brothel to pay off his debts. When the young man tries to buy her contract from the brothel owner, he kills one of the bosses' thugs in a fight. A crime syndicate that the young man willingly affiliated himself with failed. Now on the run from both criminals and the police, the star-crossed lovers flee through Taiwan. A powerful morality tale, the film exposes the dangers of the underworld economy, and the ubiquity of crime and violence on the island.

A-Te used to be a social movement fanatic. But after suffering the pain of divorce and the death of his child, he changed his profession and became a taxi driver. Ma Le, a young aboriginal man, came to Taipei alone to earn a living on construction sites. However, unable to bear the exploitation, and in a rage, Ma Le accidentally killed a site superintendent and was sentenced to death. A-Te gave Ma Le a ride in his taxi on the night that Ma Le committed the killing and their two fates were thereafter intertwined.