Peony Birds

Rebellious girl Lan leaves home at a young age, and the cruel reality forces her to sell her body in order to get by. Her hope of happiness and freedom vanishes the moment she stabs her priest husband. After being released from prison, she meets Blackie, her live-in boyfriend who is a gambler, and Xiu Xiu, a kind-hearted girl who intends to help her lead a normal life. But Lan makes the same mistake again and is back in jail...

The year is 1943 and Taiwan is under Japanese colonization. After finishing his studies in Japan, famous Taiwanese sculptor and painter Ching-Cheng Huang receives an offer to teach in Beiping Art School. He decides to visit friends and family back home before leaving for China. He boards the passenger liner "Takachiho Maru" in Kobe, Japan, with his girlfriend, a pianist. Tragically, the luxurious liner is torpedoed by an American submarine and sinks off the coast of Keelung, Taiwan. Decades later, Shou-shou, a fine art restorer with a crippling illness, finds one of Huang's paintings in an exhibition. As she restores the painting, Shou-shou learns about the artist, the stories behind his work and his death at sea. She recreates the story of the painting "Woman in Black", and romantically imagines the ways the artist painted his girlfriend. The more she studies, the more she was inspired by Huang's value of art and of life. Restoring Huang's painting thus becomes Shou-shou's way of ...

Two teenage girls make a pledge to each other to be as "man and wife" in a small Chinese fishing town. The notions of women's rights or sexual freedom are absent in their oppressive patriarchal culture, and when one becomes happily married to a stranger, the other is cruelly betrothed to the abusive son of a wealthy family. Seeking to free herself from a lifetime of abuse, Hui-hua desperately looks for a way out.

The film, adapted from the Chung Chao-Cheng novel of the same title, Song of Chatian Mountain, depicts the intellectual tyranny of the occupiers at the end of the Second World War and the way that educated persons resisted the war. A Taiwanese man, Lu Zhixiang, well educated in Japan and a judo master, returns to Taiwan to live up to his high ideals.

Accustomed to the life of a young master, Wen Hsieng is forced to compromise under the pressure of family members, and arranges to go to the mountain temple to study. The environment in the temple makes it difficult for him to adapt to.

Different styles of dining can also be portrayed as different types of life. Restaurant hostess, Liu Fen-Fang, prepares a feast for the new opening of her restaurant. Deep in her heart, however, she also experiences her most bitter moment. Her family is shattered when she hears news of her husband's affair.

A woman from foreign place buries her secrets in smoke and shadows. A girl trussed by routine has trouble seeing herself. A bored man is trying his best to keep himself going.

Literature and tales of the military dependents' villages leave a unique and precious character in Taiwanese history since the Great Retreat in 1949. The people have gradually formed a culture within the villages. To dive into the richness of military dependents' villages, the film interviews many prominent Taiwanese writers who grew up in the first and second generation of military dependents' villages and quotes extensively from literary passages, creating the reappearance of the unforgettable lives in the villages and of the cultures of Waishengren.