World Premiere | Restored Classics | Out Of Competition
Taiwan, 1962/2K 2026, 94’, Taiwanese, Mandarin
Directed by: Lee Hsing
Screenplay: Ting Yi
Cinematography (b/w): Hu Chi-yuan
Editing: Chou Tao-chun
Art Director: Chang Chun-ming
Music: Li Kuo-pao
Producers: Li Tzu-yi, Chen Ju-lin
Executive Producer: Li Yu-chieh
Cast: Mu Hung, Chin Shih, Wei Ping-ao, Luo Wang-lin, Wang Man-chiao, Chi Fu-sheng
Date of First Release in Territory: n/a
Released in 1962,
Good Neighbors occupies a transitional position within Lee Hsing’s career. Having begun in Taiyupian production, Lee would move into Mandarin language filmmaking with
Our Neighbors in 1963.
Good Neighbors lies between these two phases, and also marks the first production of his Independence Film. Working from the familiar narrative premise of parental hostility and youthful romance, the film transforms linguistic misunderstanding between Mandarin and Taiwanese into the engine of conflict, gradually unfolding into a domestic melodrama whose emotional entanglements register the shifting ethnic and social formations of postwar Taiwan.
The story centres on the Chen family, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine who have recently arrived from China and opened a clinic next door to the Ng family, whose livelihood rests on Western medicine. Courtesy is maintained at the surface, but mutual distrust lingers beneath it. Their medical beliefs diverge, their languages do not quite meet, and each attempt at conversation seems only to produce further confusion. This uneasy equilibrium is finally disrupted when love enters the picture.
Language is the film’s first and most visible source of conflict. The Chen family speaks Mandarin, while the Ng family uses Taiwanese in everyday life, and the gap between them generates a steady stream of comic misunderstanding. Yet this linguistic dislocation does more than produce farce. It also opens onto deeper tensions concerning marriage, class and cultural identity. Closely tied to this is the opposition between the
waishengren (someone from outside Taiwan) Chinese medicine household and the
benshengren (local Taiwanese) Western medicine household. The contrast is highly symbolic. The difference between Chinese and Western medicine evokes not only competing systems of healing, but also broader oppositions between China and the West, tradition and modernity, conservatism and openness. These antagonisms are eventually absorbed into the romantic trajectories of the younger generation, whose embrace of middle class ideals of free love makes the rigid certainties of the parental generation unsustainable.
Formally,
Good Neighbors may be read as a bilingual film driven by linguistic misalignment. Lee adapts this structure to a distinctly Taiwanese context. Here, cultural difference is no longer merely geographical. It is inseparable from the social fractures that followed the Chinese Civil War and the 1949 relocation of the Nationalist government to Taiwan, when large numbers of mainland migrants arrived on the island and tensions emerged between
waishengren newcomers and
benshengren residents, shaping the political reality of provincial division for decades to come.
The resolution offered by the film follows the familiar logic of popular melodrama. Through interfamily marriage and the restoration of domestic harmony, ethnic antagonism is symbolically reconciled. In this sense,
Good Neighbors becomes a form of cultural fantasy, even a prophetic vision of coexistence, imagining that people from different backgrounds might gradually forge a new social order through the intimacies of everyday life.
In 2026, the 70th anniversary of
Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan, the first Taiyupian shot on 35mm and publicly released, invites renewed attention to Taiyupian as a commercial form rooted in Taiwan and shaped by its local market. Seen from this vantage point, the bilingual hybridity of
Good Neighbors breaks from the dominant monolingual conventions of its time and anticipates a more realistic acknowledgment of Taiwan’s multilingual social context. Within Lee Hsing’s own body of work, the film’s focus on family ethics and emotional conflict anticipates the thematic concerns that would later define his Mandarin-language works in the Healthy Realism movement: a sustained attention to local life and the moral dimensions of human nature.
Lee Hsing
Lee Hsing (1930-2021) moved to Taiwan in 1948, where he entered the film industry under the guidance of Tang Shao-hua. He made his debut with the two-part comedy-journey film Brother Liu and Brother Wang on the Roads in Taiwan (1959, co-directed with Fang Zhen and Tien Feng); in 2011 the film was screened at FEFF as part of “Asia Laughs!” Lee’s name is linked to the genre of Healthy Realism (Beautiful Duckling, 1964; My Silent Wife, 1965). He won seven Golden Horse Awards for Best Film during his career, and was nominated for Best Director three times.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1964 – Beautiful Duckling
1964 – Oyster Girl
1965 – My Silent Wife
1972 – Execution in Autumn
1978 – He Never Gives Up
1979 – My Native Land
1979 – Good Morning, Taipei
1986 – The Heroic Pioneers