Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for A Brighter Summer Day (1991) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Chang Chen, Lisa Yang, Chang Kuo-Chu, Elaine Jin Yan-Ling, Wang Chuan, Chang Han DIRECTOR: Edward Yang CINEMATOGRAPHY: Longyu Zhang, Chang Hui-kung MUSIC: Zhang Hongda PRODUCTION: Yang & His Gang Filmmakers, Brighter Summer Productions

Box Office Performance

Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for A Brighter Summer Day (1991). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

Set in early 1960s, in Taipei, the film is based on a real incident that the director remembers from his school days when he was 13. The original Chinese title, , translates literally as "The Homicide Incident of the Youth on Guling Street", referring to the 14-year-old son of a civil servant who murders his girlfriend, who was also involved with a teenaged gang leader, for unclear reasons. The gang leader and girlfriend are involved in the conflict between gangs of children of formerly-mainland families and those of Taiwanese families. The film places the murder incident in the context of the political environment in Taiwan at that time. The film's political background is introduced in intertitles thus:

Chang Kuo-chu, and his son Chang Chen (in his debut) are both cast in this film playing father and son.

Yang used Goodfellas as the model of a gangster movie.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: 8 wins & 13 nominations total

Awards Won: ★ Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film (28th Golden Horse Film Awards)

Nominations: ○ International Submission to the Academy Awards

CRITICAL RECEPTION

The film received much critical acclaim and was awarded several wins in Golden Horse Film Festival, Asia Pacific Film Festival, Kinema Junpo Awards and Tokyo International Film Festival. Three different versions of the film were edited: the original 237-minute version, a three-hour version and a shorter 127-minute version. He argues that in A Brighter Summer Day, Yang combined some of the cinematographic and staging tendencies that were revealed to him by his contemporary Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness and other contemporary films. He also remarks that the "breadth of action is extraordinary, and a sense of the contradictory pulls of daily life emerges steadily... the result is a dispassionate look at teenaged passions, a deromanticized treatment of young people growing up in a repressive milieu." Jonathan Rosenbaum named it one of his 100 favorite films of all-time in 2004 and arguably the greatest Taiwanese film ever, likewise voted it one of the 10 best films of the 1990s, and extolled its "novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu," use of objects, significance in the Taiwanese New Wave, and likened it to Rebel Without a Cause in their "nocturnal lyricism and cosmic despair." In Film Comments best films of the 1990s poll, A Brighter Summer Day was considered one of the 10 best or 10 most underrated films of the 1990s by 7 critics, academics, and programmers, including Barbara Scharres, former programmer at the Chicago Film Center, who named it the film of the 1990s, calling it a "film that transforms narrative through its deeply personal sense of observation, and grips the emotions and imagination with its steadfast power." Ari Aster named it one of his favorite films in The Criterion Collection in 2018 and commented that "A Brighter Summer Day is just an amazing gangland epic. I don’t know how you watch it without becoming convinced that you’re watching the greatest movie ever made. It’s like The Godfather in that way."