Awards: Winner – FIPRESCI Prize (Venice Film Festival 2003)

Film Short Description:

A rainy Taipei night. An old, possibly haunted cinema closing down. One final film. Cinemagoers, patrons of a dying art and practice, seek their pleasures at the cinema: cruising for a sexual encounter, nostalgia for a forgotten 1967 wuxia film, mourning for the ending of an era.

Main Summary:

Director Tsai Ming-liang, a celebrated auteur from Taiwan’s Second New Wave, is distinctive in his meditative flow of time and observational perspectives. The long takes of this film are opportunities for reflection, grief, and even moments of comedy. With his longtime muses Lee Kang-Sheng, Miao Tien and Chen Shiang-Chyi, Goodbye, Dragon Inn not only mourns the passing of a perishing tradition, but also portrays the self-reflexive awareness of a film lover ruing the death of his medium.

While Tsai’s first cinematic encounters were not situated in Taiwan but in Kuching, Malaysia where he spent his youth, his transnational experience provides nuances that render the loneliness, alienation, and loss explored in his works transcendental and universal. The film locates itself in a transient moment before a theatre is to be torn down—a brief and tenuous instant before a certain death where time seems to reach a standstill. In this pocket of dreamlike liminal space, Tsai memorialises a forgotten past, grieves for an alienating present, and prepares for the uncertain future.