Stone Shen

30 years after the Taiwanese New Wave first emerged, the veterans such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang remain active in their careers. Ten of Edward Yang's former assistants have become directors. The filmmakers of the younger generation are facing a Taiwanese audience hungry for films that link them with Taiwanese society, whether they are fictional or not.

The film consists of three stories: One about a 5-year-old girl, one about a teenager, and still another about a 30 something woman involved in an affair with a married man. Without providing a definite answer whether the three leading actresses are playing the same person in different stages of life, the movie instead hovers on several consistent themes that keep on emerging in all the stories. For example, the image of drops of blood on the clothes, in the shape of maroon flowers.

With his complexly plotted feature-film debut, shot entirely in widescreen black and white, Taiwanese director Fu Shan-Fong has created an often hilarious satire of filmmaking in Taiwan and a parody of cinema cliches resulting from the attempts of a group of hot young advertising executives to make a major motion picture. Each of the would-be filmmakers tends to make commercials that pay tribute to their favorite movie directors (who range from Ingmar Bergman to John Woo), and all are eager to realize their dream of making an art film. At first, the group faces so many obstacles the director kills himself in despair. Shortly thereafter they find a backer who unfortunately insists they make a Hollywood-style action thriller about Mafia arms smugglers called "Striking Back." Scenes from the investor's dream movie periodically appear throughout the story, and Shan-Fong uses them to parody Asian cinema's tendency to imitate and elaborate upon Western movie conventions.

Jade is a 30-year-old reporter who is after the story that will make her career. It turns out that a series of fires have been plaguing the city and a scoop on this story is just the thing she needs.

At an old age, a former political prisoner is determined to find out where his fellow sufferers have laid since their secret execution, while Taiwan embarks on a tumultuous path of democratization.