Story in Taipei | 台中新時代凱擘影城, 大魯閣新時代 4F — The Director Took the Questions Himself

On the evening of 19 May 2019, in a cinema on the fourth floor of a mall facing Taichung station, the man who made 《台北物語》 stood up and took questions about it.

Fans had block-booked two rooms that night for the film's second anniversary — this one and 台北新光影城. Three of the cast handled Taipei. The writer-director 黃英雄 came here.

That is not a small thing to have done. He had spent two years being told his first feature was among the worst Taiwanese films ever released, and he walked into a room of people who had paid specifically to laugh at it.

The cinema was younger than the film's reputation. 凱擘影城 launched as a brand on 1 January 2017, backed by 凱擘, 台灣大哥大 and 富邦金創, and picked Taichung for its first site — taking over a floor that had been a 威秀影城. Nine auditoriums, 2,729 seats, a ten-metre ceiling, three minutes' walk from the new station building.

It announced its closure on 8 February 2022 and sold its last ticket on the fifteenth, the third Taichung cinema to go dark in four months. 威秀影城 has since taken the floor back, which is where it started.

黃英雄 was seventy when he directed this film, after decades writing for television, theatre and glove-puppet troupes. He has said he respects the criticism without being swept along by it. He applied to the Ministry of Culture for production funding four years running and was refused each time, and for more than twenty years he has stood in public libraries describing films aloud, live, for audiences who cannot see the screen.

Ride the escalator to the fourth floor. The foyer is close to what the photograph shows — same benches, same run of numbered doors, a different logo above them. The film that filled one of those rooms in 2019 is still screened by people who arrange it themselves. The chain whose name was on that wall lasted five years.

Cover photo: the fourth-floor 凱擘影城 foyer, by Wpcpey, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Its EXIF timestamp reads 21 May 2019 — two days after the anniversary screening described here.