A Brighter Summer DayMovies like A Brighter Summer Day
- Key Features:
- Coming-of-age, First love, Gang, 1960s, Taiwan, Cultural identity, Social commentary, Family dynamics, Friendship, Injustice, Violence-moderate
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Art house enthusiasts, World cinema viewers, Drama lovers
- Emotional Arc:
- Innocence → Confusion → Disillusionment
A Brighter Summer Day

A boy experiences first love, friendships and injustices growing up in 1960s Taiwan.
A Brighter Summer Day
Three high school students experience the perks and pitfalls of love in director Leste Chen’s sensitive tale of friendship and yearning.

Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.

A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

A bullied teenage girl forms an unlikely friendship with a mysterious young man who protects her from her assailants, while she copes with the pressures of her final examinations.

A group of close friends who attend a private school all have a debilitating crush on the sunny star pupil, Shen Chia-yi. The only member of the group who claims not to is Ko Ching-teng, but he ends up loving her as well.

Yueh-chen has an obsession with her classmate Shihao, but is too shy to confess to him directly. She sends in her best friend, Kerou, to act as a go-between, and Shihao ends up falling for Kerou, who is not sure what to think of him.

Beijing, 1970s. The Cultural Revolution has driven most adults to the provinces leaving 14-year-old Monkey and his pals have free reign over the city. They hang around, get up to no good, and discover that unsolvable mystery known as "girls."

Mabel, Liam and Aaron have been friends since childhood. Their bonds of friendship are tested when, years later, they realize their friendship is the only reason they have made it through emotional hardships and extreme tragedies.

In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

Moshimo, Japan. The annual fireworks festival is about to take place and a group of schoolboys, arguing over whether they are round or flat when viewed from different angles, set out to find it out.

Office worker Truly Lin goes on a journey through her memories. 20 years ago, she had a crush on the most popular guy in school. Taiyu, a ruffian and a bully, is in love with the campus belle. Truly teams up with Taiyu to tear the golden couple apart and help each other to get the ones they love.

An autobiographical film based on Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's memories of his youth growing up in Taiwan after emigrating from mainland China.

A love story between a country boy in Beijing to study and a wealthy businessman set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

Fifteen-year-old country girl Suzume Yosano has to move to Tokyo to live with her uncle due to her father's transfer. She bumps into a mysterious man who ends up taking her to her uncle's place after she gets lost. Turns out, Suzume will be seeing him a lot more often once she starts school because... he's her homeroom teacher?!

A youth inspirational film, about how a group of high school students try to revive Chinese orchestra ensemble. They face many challenges along the way to compete nationally, including a rivalry with the more popular Western orchestra club.

Local rebellious teenager Clotaire falls for his schoolmate Jackie, but gang violence leads him to a darker destructive path. After years apart, the star-crossed lovers discover that every path they've taken leads them back together.

During summer vacation in a beachside town, 16-year-old Deniz seeks the affection of his childhood crush and navigates a love triangle.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

While his parents are away for the summer, 16-year-old Dani invites his best friend, the irrepressible Nico, to stay for the holidays. Jealously rears its head when Nico appears more interested in the local girls than in Dani. Hot summer nights and too many joints lead to experimentation which neither boy can talk about, a situation complicated by the appearance of the older and openly gay Julián, a published writer and old friend of Dani’s father.

While vacationing on the crowded beaches of Riccione, a group of teenagers becomes fast friends as they grapple with relationship issues and romance.

Two friends who haven't seen each other for thirteen years reunite. One is a successful concert pianist just back from a European tour and the other has just started a new business.

Yuan Xiangqin, a high school student, is deeply in love with Jiang Zhishu, her schoolmate. He rejects her, only for them to live together when the house that she resides in collapses.

While everyone thinks that Momo is a wild party girl, the reality is that she is shy and lonely. Can Momo confess her love to her classmate, Toji, or will her best friend Sae steal him away? It's a bittersweet drama of growing up and fitting in.

In the town of Saima, when summer is about to begin, a group of six high school students intend to live a secret adventure by spending seven carefree days in a ruined mining facility.

The puppy love of two teenagers is set against a backdrop of adults struggling with their own lives. As a couple in love, they don't care about anything but themselves and seem totally unaware about everything that surrounds them.

Five young hoodlums sing karaoke, murder, joke around, get beaten up, win and lose women, and learn the value of blind loyalty.

Two young New Yorkers begin to fall in love over the course of a single day, as a series of potentially life-altering meetings loom over their heads - hers concerning her family’s deportation to Jamaica, and his concerning an education at Dartmouth.

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.

In 1987, as martial law ends in Taiwan, Jia-han and Birdy fall in love amid family pressure, homophobia and social stigma.

Best friends as children, Mew and Tong run into each other years later as young men and find they have unexpected feelings for each other.

An old film director, unhappy with the movie he's shooting about a Hungarian circus stranded in Rome during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, faces divorce from his producer wife and other problems.

The four friends Lukas, Julius, Gino and Sanchez are trying to survive the everyday life in Neukölln, Berlin between drugs, gangs, rap, violence and boredom. Until they are one day making a serious decision with serious consequences because of a dead certain plan.

The troubled relationship between Gianni and Nino, set in the narrow-minded and prejudicial Sicily of 1982.

A family of four fractures under the weight of unmet expectations, unexpected tragedy, and uncompromising pride.

Eka and Natia leave their childhood behind and ignore societal customs to escape from their turbulent family lives.

Because of her past, 17-year-old Rio lives her days filling the emptiness in her heart with money—until one day, she meets a university professor named Kouki and falls in love.

A young American woman is sent by her parents to a cultural immersion program in Taipei where she begins a new journey of self-discovery and romance.

A wealthy young man pursues a young woman of modest means, but circumstances often separate them as the years pass.

A summer fling born under the Sicilian sun quickly develops into a heartbreaking love story that forces a boy and girl to grow up too quickly.

Introverted Girona student Nacho meets two delinquents from the city's Chinatown and gets caught up in a summer onslaught of burglaries and hold ups that will change his life.

A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.

Elisabeth and John John are raised in the same city, yet they live light years apart, separated economically, socially and culturally. That is until the day they start in the same high school class.

In the 1980s a group of foreign-born Korean teenagers who meet at a Seoul summer camp to learn what it means to be Korean. The three boys, from the U.S., Mexico, and Germany, then meet three girls who rock their world.

Shy, straight-A student Ellie is hired by sweet but inarticulate jock Paul, who needs help wooing the most popular girl in school. But their new and unlikely friendship gets tricky when Ellie discovers she has feelings for the same girl.

Teenage lovers Tony and Tyan-Hwa tip the balance of power in New York's Little Italy and Chinatown.

Jun arrives in Hong Kong from mainland China, hoping to be able to earn enough money to marry his girlfriend back home. He meets the streetwise Qiao and they become friends. As friendship turns into love, problems develop, and although they seem meant for each other they somehow keep missing out.

Childhood friends Matías and Jerónimo reach adolescence and experience sexual attraction to each other, before being separated by circumstances. Later, as young adults, they meet again, and the film follows themes of complicated relationships and sexual tensions, as well as issues of homophobia.

Two friends who work together at a Tokyo laundry are increasingly alienated from everyday life. They become fascinated with a deadly jellyfish.

The year is 1987 and Japan is just reaching the peak of its economic success. Eighteen-year old Yonosuke Yokomichi arrives in Tokyo from Nagasaki. Ordinary in every way possible, he lives in a suburb far from the excitement of the big city and commutes to a university in the center of Tokyo.

Set in the 1980s, “Monga” centers on five boys (Mosquito, Monk, Dragon, White Monkey and A-Lan) who join the "Gang of Princes" who are tired of being pushed around. As the "Gang of Princes" rise in stature, they come into conflict with other gangs jealous of their rising power.

A group of performing art troupe members each face their own trials and tribulations in Chengdu; from escaping a family scandal to dealing with unrequited love, each experiences rejection that shapes their lives.

A gay couple from Hong Kong takes a trip to Argentina in search of a new beginning but instead begins drifting even further apart.

Alex glides his mouse tenderly over online images of Vika. He has been smitten ever since he saw her with her friends and cannot get her out of his head. Unfortunately, Vika is beyond Alex’s reach because he's not welcome in her neighborhood. Nonetheless, Alex sneaks into a disco at her school and finds up the courage to ask her to dance. Moments are intense as Alex feels infatuation for the first time.

When Ah Bu, a girl from a small fishing town in Taiwan, finds a glass bottle with a romantic message, she travels to Hong Kong to find her prince charming. As it turns out, her prince charming, Albert, happens to be gay. But all is not lost when Ah Bu meets the dashing Chi Wu. Meanwhile, Ah Bu's boyfriend from Taiwan comes looking for her, as the action and romance follow Ah Bu back to Taiwan.

The suicide of a former high-school bully puts the boy's father on a quest for answers.

Vicky recalls her romances with her exes Hao Hao and Jack in the neon-lit clubs of Taipei.

Two outsiders, both shaped by the circumstances that have brought them together, forge a deep and lasting love.

The films spans two decades as the story unfolds in a series of flashbacks that begin when Qiyue and Ansheng were just thirteen. The two became inseparable until they met a boy who ended up tearing their lives apart.

At Pacific Palisades High, a poor Latino falls hard for a troubled girl from the affluent neighborhood.

A reforming ex-gangster tries to reconcile with his estranged policeman brother, but the ties to his former gang are difficult to break.

With their teen hormones raging, three high school boys help one another explore their curiosity about the opposite sex and love in this raunchy comedy.

Drifting through his gap year with its internships and travel plans, Jack has always suspected there was more to life than this. A chance encounter with the beautiful and ethereal Evelyn swerves his life radically off course.

Mika is a fresh high school student who starts texting a mysterious boy. She is shocked when he reveals who he is - Hiro, a delinquent attending her school. What she doesn't know is that Hiro isn't as bad as he seems.

Toru recalls his life in the 1960s, when his friend Kizuki killed himself and he grew close to Naoko, Kizuki's girlfriend, and another woman, the outgoing, lively Midori.

Mateo is an intelligent boy who falls in love with Daniel, but when everyone reveals that relationship, Mateo is at a crossroads, and he will have to decide between fighting his adversities or giving up everything, even his life.

Mirko and Manolo are best friends and live in the suburbs of Rome. They both live in poor conditions with their single parents, are still in school and struggle with occasional odd jobs to make ends meet. Together they share dreams of women, of sex and money, of a better life to come. Then, after killing a man in a hit-and-run one night, they get involved with the local mafia and their lives change dramatically.

An intimate study of two women friends who come to each other because of troubles with everyday life and with men and thus try to enjoy a life based on their ideas.

Two freethinking teenagers - a boy and a girl - confront with authoritarian teachers in their boarding schools. The other students treat this differently.

Oh, Ramona! seeks the transformation of Andrew from a teenager into an adult who lives candidly and selflessly his first love story, innocent and uninvolved, alternating with the second, intense and insane story, incapable of making a choice.

Something Like Summer traces the tumultuous relationship of Ben and Tim, secret high school sweethearts who grow over the years into both adulthood enemies and complicated friends.

Forced to move to a boring backwater town, a teenager embarks on affairs with a teacher and a stoner classmate.

Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.

Charts the troubled teenage years of students Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino, exploring the shifting and complex power dynamics of their relationship against the backdrop of Yūichi's love for the dreamy and abstract music of pop star Lily Chou-Chou.

In the 1960s, two classmates go looking for their missing friends and teachers, all of whom took part in an illegal book club, only to come face to face with ghosts and deformed monsters that have taken over their school.

A coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old girl who idolizes her troubled sixteen-year-old neighbor.

An uncompromising look into urban life from the eyes of a voyeuristic photographer, a rebellious teenager, and a married couple teetering on the edge of adultery.

Nacho, a 13 year old boy, crosses the threshold of adolescence trying to find his place in life in all the wrong places: a dysfunctional family and a social setting that is corrupt and violent. Can the purity of first love survive the darkest aspects of our society?

An adventurous love story between two young women of different social and economic backgrounds who find themselves going through all the typical struggles of a new romance.

Told through the eyes of sticky-fingered eight-year-old boy Big Ears, Echoes of the Rainbow takes place in a close-knit grassroots community in 1960s Hong Kong. Big Ears' mother and father run the neighborhood shoe store, and his older brother Desmond is every family's dream son - an outstanding athlete with grades worthy of Hong Kong's best school.

Yokohama, 1963. Japan is picking itself up from the devastation of World War II and preparing to host the 1964 Olympics—and the mood is one of both optimism and conflict as the young generation struggles to throw off the shackles of a troubled past. Against this backdrop of hope and change, a friendship begins to blossom between high school students Umi and Shun—but a buried secret from their past emerges to cast a shadow on the future and pull them apart.

Laura and Fabrizio have been meeting every summer in the forest by her parent's summer home. Fabrizio is a solitary boy with only his dog for company; Laura a sweet but unconfident child. This summer new aspects enter into their story as both are growing up. Laura is falling in love with Fabrizio, while he displays a new sexual awareness of her masked by his malice. Things develop further when they meet Sylvia who, unlike the innocent Laura, is confident and assertive. Fabrizio develops a fascination with her, eventually bribing Laura to fetch her to the forest to join them in play.

A terminally ill teen upsets her parents when she falls in love with a small-time drug dealer.

A group of queer best friends gather in the Fire Island Pines for their annual week of love and laughter. However, desires, dramas, drink and drugs push their bonds to the limits.

Primo is an ordinary middle-class youngster studying for his baccalaureate, who gets side-tracked when he falls in love with a rich girl. They soon learn they have to deal with her condescending friends who look down upon this upstart.

A young man’s difficult entry into adulthood, who experiences the highs and lows of his first love, while dealing with the familial fallout spurred by the financial crisis of 2008.

A coming-of-age tale about three 18-year-olds just out of high school who go to a Greek island following one of the boys' older girlfriend.

A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.

In the summer of 1986, three sixteen year old friends spend their Saturdays sneaking into movies at the local multiplex. But when one of the guys also invites the girl of his dreams to see the latest comedy, each of the teens learn more about life and love.

Childhood pals Dog and Mirales live in a little village in the south of France and spend their days just hanging out. To kill time, Mirales has got into the habit of teasing Dog mercilessly. But this summer is different: Dog meets Elsa and romance blossoms.

Seventeen-year-old Ginia leaves the countryside in search of a new life in Turin. Restless and seeking adventure, Ginia soon finds it in the beautiful, enigmatic Amelia, whose sensuality and confidence embolden her to begin modeling for the bohemian artists in their circle. A whirlwind affair ensues, and the young seamstress finds herself swept up in an unfamiliar and exciting world of discovery.

Problem student Haru Yoshida sits next to the cold and studious Shizuku Mizutani in class. Without any other friends to turn to, both of them start to get to know each other and grow closer. Haru eventually develop feelings for Shizuku and confesses his feelings to her. Will Haru and Shizuku get their happily ever after?

In 1999, a teen girl keeps close tabs on a boy in school on behalf of her deeply smitten best friend – then she gets swept up in a love story of her own.

What do you dream of when you're 16-years-old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can't get a bigger kick than dying. And that's why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning, and this story recounts how Alexis grew into himself.

Three lonely young denizens of Taipei unknowingly share an apartment: May, a real estate agent who uses it for her sexual affairs; Ah-jung, her current lover; and Hsiao-kang, who's stolen the key and uses the apartment as a retreat.

Although new friendships and new love await her, a college freshman discovers that university life is not as simple as she had hoped.

Waverly thought she had her future figured out: she’d start her medical residency in Toronto after a summer visit to her parents in Taipei. When her plans suddenly change, she makes an impulsive detour to a small Canadian town where she meets local lifeguard Blake. After he saves her from nearly drowning at a beach party, Blake offers to teach Waverly to swim, and as the lessons continue, the two unexpectedly find themselves falling in love.

Hong Kong 1997, where young people dream of love and death, suicide and murder. Moon is a cynical young debt collector, smitten by Ping, a young woman dying of kidney disease. A suicide note from a student they don't know ends up intertwining their fates.


