The little-seen Daughter of the Nile was made at a pivotal point in Hou’s career, between finishing his early coming-of-age films (with Dust in the Wind) and embarking on his great historical trilogy with A City of Sadness. In fact, this filmforms a perfect bridge between these two periods, since its portrait of a young woman struggling to keep her family together brings contemporary Taipei to the fore for the first time in Hou’s work. Daughter of the Nile presents Taiwan’s capital as a fractured, rapidly changing metropolis whose disorientations confuse and unsettle the film’s young protagonists, and it is this disorientation that underpins the search for a historical perspective in Hou’s subsequent work.