Sunless Days

Sunless Days follows Shu Kei as he travels across continents collecting memories about the Tiananmen crackdown. He speaks with filmmakers, actors, and ordinary witnesses in places like Venice, Canada, London and Hong Kong, letting their voices blend into a single, fragile portrait. Interviewees include the award-winning Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Kong director Alfred Cheung Kin Ting, and actress Deanne Ip, whose sense of national identity is stirred by the event. He also speaks with his own brothers, one who leaves Hong Kong for Australia and the other already living there as an emigrant. Rather than a conventional narrative, the testimonies are stitched together into a mural that conveys horror and outrage, yet also resilience.

Directed by Shu Kei, the documentary draws on Wu Nien-jen as creator and observer. It compiles accounts gathered in Venice, Canada, London and Hong Kong, framing a cross border response to the Tiananmen era.

Box office data for Sunless Days is not publicly documented. The film circulated in festival and art house contexts rather than wide commercial release.

Sunless Days collects voices from across the Chinese speaking world and its diaspora, offering an intimate map of memory rather than a political manifesto. By juxtaposing a filmmaker, a stage performer, and ordinary relatives, it personalizes a catastrophe that otherwise was felt at national level. The result is a documentary that invites viewers to reconsider how traumatic events ripple through families, creative communities, and cities far from Beijing.

Critics respond to Sunless Days with quiet attention, noting its restrained, reflective tone and the way it reframes political outrage as a humane inventory of personal losses. The film probes memory, exile, and responsibility, asking how a community preserves truth when official voices fall silent and time moves on. Across its mosaic structure it also hints at how art keeps a culture alive when borders close.