Teenage Fugitive
(Hsiao tao fan)

In this huis-clos film co-authored by the young Tsai Ming- liang at the dawn of the Taiwan New Wave, a young killer hunted by the police finds shelter in an apartment. Hidden there by a small boy who no one listens to as he is supposedly “weird”, the fugitive becomes a fly-on-the- wall observer of the family life of a mother and her three children. While the country is in full transition, under the iron fist of the regime (with martial law still in force) and driven by an economic boom on the path to free trade, the stubbornly silent, fleeting presence of the fugitive casts a harsh light on this family archipelago, where each member is an island buffeted in an ocean of influences and injunctions from the outside world. Aisha Rahim