The best Jag Huang’s movies

On the night of March 18th, 2000, the presidential election, as usual, three coastguards are on patrol by the seaside of Yi-Lan. Private First Class, just out of lock-up, is equipped with a walkie-talkie. The Private (second in command) has a military 65-K2 rifle and the Private recruit (rookie) has two clips of ammunition. Seeing that it's still a long, boring night ahead, The Private starts looking for excuses hazing the rookie⋯

A-Chuan, a quiet 30-year-old man working as a chef in a Japanese restaurant, collapses suddenly and is rushed to a hospital. His colleagues send him to his father, who resides in the mountains. While there, A-Chuan becomes immobile: he won’t speak, eat or even go to the toilet on his own. One day his father returns from work only to find A-Chuan sitting in the corner with his daughter lying dead in a pool of blood. In an unfamiliar, eerily calm voice, A-Chuan says, “I saw this body was empty, so I moved in.

Yang-yang is a French-Chinese mix. She has never seen her French father. She does not speak a single French word. Her mum has re-married but she has been very lonely. She started working at the entertainment industry. The fact that she is a mix is a good selling point. The film depicts how Yang-yang dealt with her life, her relationships with men, with her mother and friends.

Do Over follows five characters over twenty four hours on the last day of the year. As the interrelated stories proceed, the connections between the lives of the five characters begin to reveal themselves and their stories unravel. By depicting five different characters at emotional crossroads, Do Over examines the struggle of overcoming our greatest fears; the unknown of what lies ahead in the future, the fading value of our existence in the present, and most of all, irreversible mistakes made in the past that may catch up to us.

College student Hsiao Chih has been dreaming of studying abroad and having foreign affairs. His plan to fulfill this dream in the summer is, however, discouraged by economic down turn in Taiwan. Just as he feels depressed about the need to spend a long summer back home, taking care of his old grandma and her grocery store, here comes a Western girl named Elisa. One thing leads to another, Hsiao Chih and two women - his grandma and Elisa a girl from afar - spend a whole summer under the same roof...

Yang Ruyi (32), a fashion magazine photographer, lives with her elder sister Yang Ruxing (33), a rational, introverted detective fiction author. Ruyi has inadvertently photographed a couple making madly passionately love. Few days later in a shopping center not far from her home, she finds the woman already married, leading a child and is with a different man. Ruyi shares her secret with Ruxing who is suffering from writer's block. The two sisters begin to observe the couple; gradually Ruxing even writes some of her observations into her novel, without letting Ruyi knows it. Late one night, Ruyi views two people are arguing, but as she picks up her camera to photograph she can only see two vague, dark outlines wrestling one another; Ruyi calls the police but upon arriving, nothing seems out of order. Ruyi is convinced she has mistaken nothing; she enlarges the photo and discovers a third outline looks pretty much like her older sister...

The year is 1943 and Taiwan is under Japanese colonization. After finishing his studies in Japan, famous Taiwanese sculptor and painter Ching-Cheng Huang receives an offer to teach in Beiping Art School. He decides to visit friends and family back home before leaving for China. He boards the passenger liner "Takachiho Maru" in Kobe, Japan, with his girlfriend, a pianist. Tragically, the luxurious liner is torpedoed by an American submarine and sinks off the coast of Keelung, Taiwan. Decades later, Shou-shou, a fine art restorer with a crippling illness, finds one of Huang's paintings in an exhibition. As she restores the painting, Shou-shou learns about the artist, the stories behind his work and his death at sea. She recreates the story of the painting "Woman in Black", and romantically imagines the ways the artist painted his girlfriend. The more she studies, the more she was inspired by Huang's value of art and of life. Restoring Huang's painting thus becomes Shou-shou's way of ...

The exotic night market of Taipei is the perfect place to be if one is looking to crowd, shop, eat and game, but on this night, it's not just fun and games for those who steal things from others.