The Time to Live and the Time to Die

The Time to Live and the Time to Die is a Taiwanese drama drawn from director Hou Hsiao-hsien's own memories of growing up on the island after his family moved there from mainland China. At the centre is a boy known as Ah Ha, who settles into a new life with his parents, grandmother and siblings, adapting to local customs and dialects while the family carries the hope of one day returning to the mainland. Over the years the household is marked by the deaths of the father, then the mother and the grandmother, and by the shifting distance between generations as the children grow up and the island becomes home. The film was written by Hou and Chu Tien-wen and produced by Hui San-Chi, with Yu An-shun playing Ah Ha and Feng Tien, Mei Fang, Ru-Yun Tang, Hsin Shu-Fen and Hsiao Ai among the cast.

Released in 1985, the film runs 136 minutes. It stands first in the chronological list of Hou's features, ahead of A City of Sadness, Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, To Each His Own Cinema and The Assassin. It holds a critics' rating of 8.3 out of 10 from six reviews, while on TMDB it has 7.2 out of 10 from 112 votes.