Good Men, Good Women

“She has the role of another lifetime.”

Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) is an actress in Taipei preparing to play Chiang Biyu, a woman from the Taiwanese resistance in the 1940s. Faxed pages from her own stolen diary begin arriving, and Hou Hsiao-hsien folds them into her memories of a lover who has died, and into black-and-white scenes from the film she is rehearsing. The two women are separated by fifty years, and the film keeps returning to the people Taiwan has left unremembered.