Spring Rain 424

On 24 April 1970, three young Taiwanese studying in the United States — Peter Huang, Cheng Tzu-tsai and Huang Chin-mei — attempted to assassinate Chiang Ching-kuo, then vice-premier, in New York. The shot went wide, but the act rang around the world, and the lives of all three changed utterly as they were forced into exile. An ambitious work that fills in a missing page of Taiwanese history: interviews across Europe and the Americas, a search through scattered records, and animated reconstruction of a secret operation of which almost no footage survives. It sets aside the language of heroism to attend to the drifting lives the assassins lived afterwards, and recovers the overlooked women who took part, letting the spring rain that shook an authoritarian state half a century ago fall into public view again.

Screenings of this film