Out of the Blue

Director: Chen Kun-hou

1984 / 101min / DCP

Co-written by Hou Hsiao-hsien and frequent collaborator Chu T’ien-wen, adapting her own short story, Chen’s minimalist coming-of-age drama centers on a crucial meeting between Jielong and Tangmi (Li Chih-Hsi and Li Chih-Chyi), high school sweethearts from very different class backgrounds who, three years after her abrupt disappearance, are reunited, so that Tangmi can inform the fiercely career-oriented Jielong that he’s in fact the father of her young child. Director of the previous year’s Golden Horse Award-winning Growing Up and cinematographer of Hou’s The Boys from Fengkuei, Chen would later say of Out of the Blue that it marked “the only time in my 60-year career that I made a film I truly wanted to make… approaching an unacceptable incident with calmness, tolerance and understanding.”

Distributor: Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute

Part of Jiā: Histories of Home