GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003)

Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dreams (though they’re beginning to fray), the Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room, but as we watch the enveloping film deep into a pandemic, the sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance. Yet Goodbye, Dragon Inn, released nearly two decades ago by the internationally acclaimed Tsai Ming-liang (whose latest, Days, premiered at this year’s Berlinale), is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly.

• Directed by Tsai Ming-liang.
• 2003.
• Taiwan.
• Taiwanese & Mandarin w/ English Subtitles.
• 82 Minutes.

Programmed by Christian Mejia as part of ENTRE's summer film series THE MYSTICAL AND THE SPECTRAL: INTRODUCTION TO THAI & SLOW CINEMA

This screening is free for all ages.

Doors at 7pm

Film at 8pm

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ACCESSIBILITY

ENTRE Film Center is located at 415 W. Jackson Ave., Harlingen, TX. Our building is fully accessible to wheelchair users and other visitors who need to avoid stairs. Parking is located on the street and there is a sidewalk ramp located to the right of our building. Our micro-cinema contains modular seating that can be arranged to accommodate our visitors' needs. There is also an all-gender bathroom located in the back of the building.

If you have any questions regarding access, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected]

Host or Publisher ENTRE Film Center & Regional Archive