The first glimmering of the New Taiwanese Cinema comes in the form of a triptych of working-class daily life during (cold) wartime, scripted by Wu Nien-jen from a story by Huang Chunming entitled His Son’s Big Doll. In Hou’s vignette, a man makes his living carrying advertisement sandwich boards (hence the film’s title); in the second, two ambitious young salesmen discover too late that the pressure-cookers they sell are defective; and in the final segment a laborer is run down by a car—but his family discovers a silver lining. The Sandwich Man “expresses the existential dilemma of being Taiwanese better than any other film.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

In Taiwanese with English subtitles