World Premiere | Restored Classics | Out Of Competition
Taiwan, 1962/2K 2026, 95’, Taiwanese
Directed by: Shao Lo-hui
Story: Chen Hsiao-pi
Screenplay: Chang Yuan-fu
Cinematography (b/w): Chen Chung-yi, Chen Chung-hsin
Editing: Tung Hsiao-liang
Set Design: Wang Huo-mu
Music: Lin Li-han
Producer: Tai Chuan-li
Executive Producer: Weng Tsung-kun
Cast: Hong Yi-feng, Pai Jung, Tien Ching, Tai Pei-shan, Kuo Yeh-hsin, Wu Lao-chi, Ko Yu-min, Chen Hsiao-pi, Wen Chu, Wang Li-ching, Hsu Lien-chao
Date of First Release in Territory: June 20th, 1962
Love Never Ceases (a Taiyupian film, in taiwanese language) unfolds in southern Taiwan, where Ang Yi-feng, a musically gifted teacher, arrives at a rural school with little more than his instrument and a quiet devotion to song. There he encounters Guat-ha, whose voice resonates in harmony with his own. Set against betel nut groves, gentle winds and moonlit evenings, their relationship develops with an immediacy that appears both lyrical and inevitable. Yet this intimacy is repeatedly disrupted. Guat-ha’s foster father compels her into marriage with a wealthy chairman, while Yi-feng is dismissed from his position and departs for Alishan. Although the lovers briefly reunite and establish a life together, even welcoming a daughter, this fragile stability is once again undone. Years later, their child wanders through Taipei in search of her mother, while Yi-feng turns to performance, using song as a means of articulating what cannot be spoken. Fame follows, but each performance becomes an act of longing, as though music itself might guide his wife and daughter back to him.
Within this structure, the film is clearly situated within the conventions of romance, shaped in part by tensions associated with class. However, it does not pursue class as a sociological framework, nor does it attempt to map the mechanisms through which social hierarchy governs emotional life. Instead, class difference is condensed into the figure of the foster father, whose authority becomes the primary source of narrative conflict. Through this concentration, class ceases to function as a system open to analysis and is transformed into a dramatic principle. What the film ultimately articulates, particularly through the daughter’s resistance, is not the resolution of class contradiction but a reconfiguration of values. Under shifting historical conditions, free love begins to take precedence over material realities and inherited hierarchies.
At the same time, the film intermittently introduces Miss Li, a schoolteacher infatuated with Ang Yi-feng, who remains only loosely connected to the central narrative. Even so, her scenes offer revealing glimpses of the filmmakers’ deeper investment in the idea of romantic autonomy. In one moment, waiting alone in Ang’s home, she looks into a mirror and says, “Mr. Ang, aren’t you aware of my feelings? I love you so much.” In another, when Ang is pursued and beaten by the foster father’s men, Miss Li intervenes on his behalf, engaging them in a rare moment of physical resistance. Set against the social conservatism of the 1960s, such moments grant female characters a degree of agency that exceeds their narrative function, suggesting the emergence of new modes of subjectivity even at the margins of the story.
The film also preserves images of considerable historical value. Its camera records urban spaces that have since disappeared or been transformed, including Zhonghua Shopping Mall, now demolished, Fong Da Coffee in Ximending, and Taipei Main Station as a defining landmark of the city. Music, moreover, is central to the film’s affective structure, most notably in the title song
Love Never Ceases. When the lyric “I know full well you don’t really mean it” is replaced with “I know you will never return”, the emotional register of the song shifts from disappointment to irrevocable loss. The subsequent line, “I just can’t stop loving you”, is thus reconfigured as an expression of separation rather than hesitation. Similarly, the alteration of “the harbour that witnessed our romance” to “the tree that witnessed our romance” relocates memory from a generalised space to one anchored within the lovers’ shared experience. Thereafter, each recurrence of the melody recalls not only the intimacy of their relationship, but also a broader structure of collective memory for a generation in Taiwan.
Shao Lo-hui
Shao Lo-hui (1919-1993) spent his early years in Tainan before moving to Japan, where he studied writing and directing. Returning to Taiwan after the war, he founded his own theatre troupe and soon stepped into filmmaking. His 1955 Six Talents’ Romance of the Western Chamber is recognised as the first privately produced Taiyupian. Shao became known for lyrical works such as Love Never Ceases and for adapting Taiwanese and Japanese folktales. He also performed under the name Mei Fang-yu, collaborated on productions in Japan and later directed Mandarin-language films.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1961 – Beggar Son-in-law
1961 – Chien-Lung, the Little Hero
1962 – Love Never Ceases
1962 – Little Heroes vs. Two Masked Villains
1962 – The Wandering of Three
Siblings
1968 – Moonlight Superman
1968 – Dragon Superman