A City of Sadness is a 1989 Taiwanese historical drama film directed by
Hou Hsiao-Hsien. It tells the story of a family embroiled in the tragic "
White Terror" that was wrought on the
Taiwanese people by the
Kuomintang government (KMT) after their arrival from
mainland China in the late 1940s, during which thousands of Taiwanese were rounded up, shot, and/or sent to prison. The film was the first to deal openly with the KMT's authoritarian misdeeds after its 1945 takeover of
Taiwan, which had been restored to China following
Japan's defeat in WWII, and the first to depict the
February 28 Incident of 1947, in which thousands of people were massacred.