Explores the relationship of a mother and daughter, both of whom are embittered by their lives.

Peony Birds

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 Twin Bracelets

Two girls of disparate class backgrounds suffer through teenage rebellion, drug abuse, and prostitution in cutting-edge Taipei.

Spring Cactus

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 ...

The Strait Story

The film, adapted from the Chung Chao-Cheng novel of the same title, The Song of Cha-Tian 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.

Cha Tian Shan zhi ge

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.