A beloved favorite among Hou’s early films, Dust in the Wind is an affecting and poignantly fatalistic story of first love which follows a young couple finishing high school and leaving their remote mining village in search of work and a new life in Taipei. The film’s hypnotic extended opening shot on a train passing through a mountain landscape makes clear the careful formal lyricism—an absolute control of light, shadow and movement—which marks the film as an important milestone in Hou’s oeuvre. At the same time, the train is one of several pointed meta-cinematic references throughout the film (the plein air village screening, the decrepit Taiwan movie house) which reveal Hou’s canny awareness of the role of the New Taiwan cinema in shaping a mythos about Taiwanese history and place. Ironically, Dust in the Wind‘s elegy to waning village life transformed the film’s stunning mountainside setting into a popular tourist attraction and nostalgic pilgrimage site which today attracts streams of visitors from Taipei and abroad.