Story in Taipei | 喜滿客絕色影城, Hanzhong Street — The Last Screen to Switch Off

On 19 May 2017 a Taiwanese film opened on three screens and nowhere else. This was one of them. 《台北物語》 (Story in Taipei) was written and directed by 黃英雄, a playwright who had served on Golden Horse juries. It had been shot back in 2014 and sat unreleased for three years. Its distributor booked it into the three cinemas run by 喜滿客影城, the Cinemark joint venture with Taiwan's 威京總部集團 — two in Taipei, one in Kaohsiung. The first week was quiet. Then a scathing review posted on 22 May began circulating on Facebook, and over the Dragon Boat holiday the houses filled. What happened next is the reason to stand here. The run was extended into a third week. The film returned to first-run screens after it had already closed. Fans paid out of their own pockets for anniversary sessions in 2018, and again on 19 May 2019, when three of the cast took questions from a Taipei audience while the director did the same in Taichung. The cinema did not last as long as the film's afterlife. 絕色影城 opened on Hanzhong Street in 1999 and was taken over by 喜滿客 in 2014. It closed on 31 March 2024 — the chain's final site anywhere in Taiwan. 威秀影城 took the space that September. Look up to the eighth floor, above the shoe shop and the hotpot restaurant. The film that opened here is still screened by people who organise the screenings themselves. The company whose logo hung over that entrance no longer runs a single cinema in this country. Cover photo: Ximending at Hankou and Hanzhong Street, March 2024, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons. The 喜滿客影城 絕色店 sign is visible above the entrance; the timestamp reads 14 March 2024, seventeen days before it closed.