Free screening!

This rapturously beautiful 2005 feature by Hou Hsiao-hsien is a triumph about the melancholy play of time and memory. The action is broken into three different love stories, each set in a different era—a 1966 pool hall, a prosperous 1911 brothel, and contemporary Taipei—but starring the same leads, the impossibly glamorous Shu Qi and Chang Chen. While these stories deliberately echo his earlier works, Hou uses them to chart the transformation of Taiwanese life, love, and the relationship between men and women over the last hundred years. He captures all this with the poetic intensity that has defined his work—an absolute mastery of space and rhythm and a humane tenderness suffuses every frame. An NYFF43 selection