The first of Hou’s so-called coming-of-age trilogy (followed by Dust in the Wind and A Time to Live and a Time to Die) seems at first to be the lighter of his early works, a deliberately minor childhood tale made with child actors and largely adapting their point-of-view. Yet despite its bucolic setting and shimmering images Hou’s story of two young siblings visiting their grandfather in verdant rural Taiwan while their sick mother is hospitalized quickly turns unexpectedly dark by revealing the blunt insensitivity, menace and cruelty of the adult world, a world of deception, sexual promiscuity and irrational fear of the death that the wide-eyed children accept with more grace and understanding than their elders. Often cited as a secret precursor to Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Hou’s little known early work uses its child protagonists as a lens through which to define the detached, understated realism that remains a key to Hou’s cinema.