Dust in the Wind (film)

Dust in the Wind is a 1986 Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It is based on co-screenwriter Wu Nien-jen's own experiences, and is the first of a trilogy of Hou and Wu's collaborations, the others being A City of Sadness (1989) and The Puppetmaster (1993).

The film depicts the bittersweet love story of two village sweethearts, Ah Yuan (阿遠)  and Ah Yun (阿雲), who left hometown Jiufen (九份) to work in Taipei city together after graduating from junior high school. It is highly acclaimed for Hou Hsiao-hsien's nostalgic depiction of Taiwan's rural past, when trains were the main transportation in the 1970s. The soundtrack by Chen Ming-chang (陳明章) and the cinematography by Lee Ping-bing (李屏賓) won the Best Cinematography and Music Award in Festival des 3 Continents in 1987.

Plot
Ah Yuan and Ah Yun are childhood sweethearts who live in Jiufen, a rural town on the hills in northern Taiwan. Their fathers were all coal miners. They went to school together everyday by train and walked on the railway and the winding uphill road to go home together. After graduation from high school, Ah Yuan went to Taipei to find a job in a printing shop. A year later, Ah Yun also came to Taipei and worked in a tailor shop. They had a hard time adjusting to urban life in Taipei. Ah Yuan’s motorbike was stolen when he and Ah Yun were shopping for shoes at Chunghua Market (中華商場) and Ah Yun was terribly homesick. Thankfully they had some friends, who were also from the countryside. Later, Ah Yuan was drafted and went to serve in the Kinmen Defense Command of the Army. He wrote many letters to Ah Yun and she wrote back to him regularly until one day Ah Yuan’s letters to her began to be rejected and she stopped writing to him. He was totally heartbroken when he received the letter from his younger brother telling him Ah Yun had married a postman without letting her parents know. But he fully recovered from the breakup when he was discharged from the army and returned to his hometown wearing the shirt Ah Yun made for him. Finding his mom soundly asleep and listening to his grandpa’s familiar complaints about how the typhoon caused a poor harvest of his sweet potatoes, Ah Yuan was filled with the happiness of being at home.

Production
The film features the master of glove puppetry Li Tian-lu (李天祿) in the role of the grandfather. Li became an iconic actor in Hou's films after he took a role in this film. This film is Li Tian-lu's debut film performance, and it is also Chen Ming-Chang 's first film soundtrack.

Wang Chien-wen, who played Ah Yuan, joined the production when he was about to  graduate from the Department of Theatre Arts of Chinese Culture University in 1985. This is also the only film he ever performed in his life. Unfortunately, Wang died early in 2014.

Dust in the Wind portrays the urbanization of Taiwan in the 1970s, when more and more youngsters left their hometowns to find jobs in the city. The film touches upon social issues such as violence in the workplace some of them have to endure. It also portrays the miners complaining about the ill treatment of  the mining company and proposing to go for a strike.

Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wu Nian-chen jointly wrote a letter to James Soong, director of the Information Bureau of the Executive Yuan, requesting his help to obtain assistance from the military department for the scenes involving Ah Yuan’s military service. Central Motion Picture Corporation also submitted the script and applied for military support to go to Kinmen for on-site shooting. However, the military department rejected the request due to the concerns that the plot of Ah Yuan being ditched by his sweetheart during military service might have a negative impact on the soldiers. The scenes in Kinmen thus had to be shot in Xiangshan in Taipei.

The outdoor screening of Beautiful Duckling in the village in this film is considered to be a deliberate tribute to Li Hsing, who is the director of this representative film of Healthy Realism (健康寫實).

The location of the tailor’s shop where Huen worked after arriving in Taipei is now the Red House Theater in Ximending, Taipei. According to Chu T’ien-wen', in the original script Ah Yun was to work in a restaurant, but when Chu T’ien-wen scouted the location at Ximending (西門町), she found that a costume shop very nostalgic, so she changed the script and the film finally was shot in this place.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1996 film Goodbye South, Goodbye opens with a return to the Shifen Station where Wan and Huen once stepped on the railway tracks. This time the camera is placed at the rear of the train instead of at the head as in Dust in the Wind, thus conveying a sense of farewell.

Jiufen, once a popular town for gold mining, became one of the most well known tourist attractions in Taiwan because of this film and City of Sadness (1989), whose story is also set here. Hou even regretted that he ever made City of Sadness and caused the ruin of the quiet small town, which was captured in Dust in the Wind.