Cinema Galeries : A Brighter Summer Day

Cinema Galerie: A Brighter Summer Day 15/08 @ 10h00 (237 mins) [...] Taiwan, 1960s. Young Xiao Si’r starts high school and gets up to all kinds of mischief with his friends. Around them, two rival gangs clash, but Xiao Si’r keeps his distance from their activities — until the day he meets Ming and falls in love with her. However, she is the girlfriend of Honey, the leader of one of the two gangs… [...] For two decades after its making, Edward Yang’s magisterial *A Brighter Summer* *Day* was more an alluring legend than a known presence for American cinephiles. Passed over by festivals, including Cannes and New York, after its completion in 1991, the four-hour film gradually began to circulate in specialized venues and among critics, with the result that it was named one of the most important films of the nineties in polls at the decade’s end. Yet it was only with its first, limited U.S. theatrical run in 2011, following a restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, that it was widely hailed as a masterpiece of modern cinema as well as a defining work of the New Taiwan Cinema, which enjoyed a decade-long flowering beginning in the early eighties. Though now decades old, Yang’s fourth feature retains an inexhaustible freshness that speaks to viewers the world over. Like a Taiwanese *Rebel Without a Cause* made with the gravity and epic sweep of *The Godfather,* the film, which has more than a hundred speaking parts, is above all a *vision,* in terms of both place and time. The place is Taipei, Yang’s home and the setting and subject of all seven of his features. As for time, we might consider two meanings. The years depicted are 1960–61, a particular juncture in modern Taiwanese history. But the time we witness is also that of adolescence, with all its inner turmoil, outer self-consciousness, and obsessive quest for identity. (...) Godfrey Cheshire, [Criterion](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3981-a-brighter-summer-day-coming-of-age-in-taipei) [Ciname Galleries](https://galeries.be/en/a-brighter-summer-day/) [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/film/a-brighter-summer-day/) For Dreamers, Coffee shots, Orezza, eau de Saint-Georges!