Story in Taipei | 台北新光影城, 獅子林商業大樓 — The Screening the Audience Booked Themselves

Two years to the day after it opened, the film came back to Ximending because its audience paid for the room.

On 19 May 2019 fans block-booked 台北新光影城, on the fourth and fifth floors of 獅子林商業大樓, and 台中凱擘影城 on the same evening. In Taipei three of the cast — 邱志宇, 張哲豪 and 康祿祺 — stayed after the credits to take questions. In Taichung the writer-director 黃英雄 did the same.

It was the second time they had done it. On the first anniversary in 2018 fans funded a session they called a 回魂場, and it put 《台北物語》 back on first-run screens.

The distinction is the whole point of standing here. The three 喜滿客 screens that released the film in May 2017 were a commercial booking — a distributor decided, and a distributor could stop. Everything after that was arranged by people who wanted to be in the room, and the film has now outlived all three of those cinemas: 京華 closed in 2019, 夢時代 in 2022, 絕色 in 2024.

新光影城 has operated on this site since 2004. The Ximending branch holds three auditoriums and 939 seats, and was refitted in 2015.

Take the lift to the fourth floor and nothing marks any of it — no plaque, no still, no poster. The only evidence that a cult film was resurrected here is that the cinema is still open and still takes block bookings. Which means it could happen again on any given Sunday.

Cover photo: 獅子林商業大樓, Ximending, January 2010, by Masayuki (Yuki) Kawagishi, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows the building exterior; the cinema occupies floors four and five inside.