Hou Hsiao-hsien established himself as a chronicler of the everyday nostalgia of childhood in his Summer at Grandpa's (1984), which was quite well received at international festivals (although commercially, Hou is out of the running in his own country; with each feature, as the films get better, Hou has said, the commercial picture "gets worse as it goes along"). A Time to Live and a Time to Die, featured at last year's San Francisco International Film Festival, is a largely autobiographical picture of a young boy's coming of age, shot in the very rooms and on the streets where Hou grew up. It is also a portrait of life in a lower middle-class family, displaced since the late forties when they came, but temporarily, to Taiwan, the land of promise, and with the revolution found themselves marooned. The boy (called Ah-Ha, his grandmother's fond epithet) and his siblings learn to screen out the grown-ups' talk of "home" just as they do the ear-shattering excitement that passes for news on the radio. But Hou is at his best in depicting the subtle way in which exile draws the disparate family together, not apart. The increasingly moody and taciturn boy Ah-Ha evidently flirted with delinquency and rebellion before becoming the moody, taciturn, rebellious film director he is today-eschewing the dramatic close-up and even the dramatic moment, focusing instead unblinkingly on the small ways in which people like his own parents cope with life, before the sad release of death.