Two brothers pull a Taipei family in opposite directions in Chung Mong-Hong's A Sun, a 2019 Taiwanese drama about pride, disappointment, and the debts a family keeps long after any wrongdoing has been punished.
What is A Sun about?
A driving instructor father holds his household to a standard he can barely explain, and a Taipei family absorbs one blow after another when the elder son ends up in juvenile detention. Chung Mong-Hong follows the household across several years, tracking how favoritism, guilt, and silence pass between a mother, a father, and two very different sons. Crime and drama sit side by side here, since the fallout from a courtroom decision keeps intruding on ordinary domestic scenes: a family dinner, a driving lesson, a hospital visit. What holds the film together is patience — the camera lingers on faces long after a conversation should have ended, letting resentment and love sit in the same frame.
About the cast
Yi-Wen Chen and Shu-qin Ke anchor the film as the parents, playing a couple who rarely raise their voices even when the story around them turns violent. Chien-Ho Wu and Greg Hsu play the sons whose choices pull the family in different directions, with Guan-Ting Liu, Ivy Yin, and Chen-Ling Wen rounding out a cast built around long scenes and few words.
Context & significance
A Sun arrived from Taiwan in 2019 and traveled widely on the festival circuit before finding a broader audience through streaming, part of a wave of East Asian family dramas that trade melodrama for restraint. Chung Mong-Hong, who also shot the film himself under his cinematographer alias, favors static, symmetrical frames that put a family's silences on display rather than its arguments. At 156 minutes, the film has the room to let its crime-drama threads develop slowly, following a juvenile court case through years rather than months. Its Taiwanese setting and Mandarin dialogue give it a specific texture, but the story it tells — a parent measuring children against different standards — travels easily.
Watching A Sun on Ktime
A Sun streams on K-Time with a free account login, no subscription required to browse the page itself. K-Time's library serves the Iranian diaspora with a Farsi-language interface, so browsing, searching, and account management can all happen in Persian even when a film like this one plays in its original Mandarin.