About

Made for the Taiwan Television Enterprise station, the dark melodrama All the Corners of the World is Tsai Ming-liang’s first directorial credit for a film. After his work as a writer on Taiwanese television, Tsai received the opportunity to helm this tale of a family working in Taipei’s red-light district. The son, a young schoolboy named Ah-tong, skips class to smoke in the cinema and re-sell scalped tickets to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness. His parents work as cleaners at a seedy love motel, while Ah-tong’s sister Michelle is slowly being groomed by a local pimp.

Within the familiar framework of a TV drama, Tsai highlights the disparity between the working-class family and the idle chatter about Taipei’s bright future in powerful, sometimes even bleak, terms. All the Corners of the World contains moments and motifs that would later define the director as a leading figure in contemporary filmmaking: a motorcycle is smashed, transactional sex is purchased, a family unit fractures and there is even a brief appearance from Lee Kang-sheng, heralding the arrival of one of cinema’s most fertile partnerships.