Goodbye, Dragon Inn
- Mon, Dec 7
The Frida Cinema's seating is first-come, first-serve. For our Midnight Screenings, please plan on arriving by 11:30pm to ensure ample time for parking, picking up concessions, and securing optimal seats. Screening will begin promptly at midnight.
Director: Tsai Ming-liang Run Time: 82 min. Release Year: 2003 Language: Chinese
Starring: Chen Shiang-Chyi, Kiyonobu Mitamura, Lee Kang-sheng, Miao Tian, Shih Chun
What better way to end our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series than by celebrating the magic of the movie theater with Tsai Ming-Liang’s haunting, hypnotic Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
On the final night before an old Taipei movie palace closes its doors, a handful of patrons gather to watch King Hu’s classic martial arts film Dragon Inn. On screen, swordsmen battle in a long-gone world of cinematic fantasy. In the theater, ghosts seem to linger in the shadows, a projectionist works almost entirely unseen, and a mysterious young man wanders through the empty corridors searching for connection. Among the sparse audience are two aging actors who once appeared together in Dragon Inn, watching themselves, and the cinema they once knew, disappear.
With almost no dialogue and an extraordinary sensitivity to the act of watching, Tsai Ming-liang transforms a nearly empty movie theater into a place of queer longing. The furtive glances, anonymous encounters, and solitary figures drifting through the darkness evoke the secretive spaces where desire has so often found refuge. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a film about so many things: a ghost story, a love letter to cinema, and a profoundly melancholic meditation on loneliness. Goodbye, Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema!