A City of Sadness Plot

A City of Sadness (Chinese: 悲情城市; pinyin: bēiqíng chéngshì) is a 1989 Taiwanese historical drama film by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It tells the story of a family embroiled in the tragic "White Terror" that was wrought on the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government (KMT) after their arrival from mainland China in the late 1940s, during which thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison. The film was the first deal openly with the KMT's authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 takeover of Taiwan from Japan, and the first to depict the 228 Incident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred.

The film is regarded as the first installment in a trilogy of films that deal with taiwanese history, which also includes The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995).

The film depicts one family's experiences during the White Terror. The eldest brother is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, one of the middle brothers is driven insane in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother Lin Wen-Ch'ing (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) is a mute who wants to flee to the mountains with his friends to fight in the anti-KMT resistance movement. By the end of the film only the youngest brother, the photographer Wen-Ch'ing, is alive to tell, in writing, the story of his family's destruction.

The film won the Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The film also revived the ghost town of Jioufen, where it was set.