A Brighter Summer Day

This isn't so much a drama as an intimate observational documentary following the lives of people recently arrived on the island of Taiwan after the Chinese communist party took control of the mainland. There is still a considerable degree of militaristic life amongst the population, and the secret police are never far from the minds of the adults whilst the adolescents come to terms with their own, quite often gang-related, issues too. Those are not, initially at any rate, gangs in the violent sense of New York's "Jets" and "Sharks", but they are just as important in providing a degree of structure, identity and security for a rootless youth who are as uncertain of their future as they are of their past. With more than an oblique nod to "Romeo and Juliet", we meet "Si'r" (Chang Chen) who has a curiously ambivalent relationship with "Ming" (Lisa Yang), with both affiliated to opposing...