Hou's third historical film explores Taiwan's period known as the White Terror, more deadly than our postwar Red Scare, and until recently, not much talked about. Hou makes a bold experiment with time-real, past, and imagined-to place his actors and audience as observers who gradually become inextricably involved in history. The film opens in the present, when a film actress, Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh), begins receiving troubling faxes indicating that someone has stolen her journal from her days as a barmaid and gangster's mistress-in her memory, halcyon days made palpable by passion. At the same time she is rehearsing her role in a historical drama about Chiang Bi-yu, who bravely joined the anti-Japanese resistance in China in the forties, only to be imprisoned as a subversive by Taiwan's Nationalist government in the fifties, giving up her child for adoption and her lover to a firing squad. If the historical past with its martyrs is black and white, the recent past vibrant with colors, what, the film asks, is the spiritual tenor of the present?