Thousands Of People In Taiwan Met At A Park To Cry To A Famous Movie While Counting Down To 2025

About 3,000 people in Taipei, Taiwan, spent the last day of 2024 collectively “crying” in a park as a unique way to celebrate the new year.

The event, titled “Crying While Counting Down to the New Year at Da’an Forest Park Again”, is a tribute to an iconic scene from the Taiwanese film “Vive L’Amour”, directed by Tsai Ming-Liang.

In the film, actress Yang Kuei-mei’s character cries for seven uninterrupted minutes on a park bench in the now most well-known park in Taipei, a deeply moving scene filmed in a single take with no dialogue, becoming a classic in Taiwanese cinematic history.

In 2023, Li Si-Han, a 22-year-old university student, was inspired by the movie to create a Facebook event inviting people to “cry while counting down to the New Year at Da’an Forest Park”.

What began as an inside joke among film lovers unexpectedly gained widespread traction.

Now in its second year, the event was co-organized by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute to mark both the park and “Vive L’Amour”’s 30th anniversary.

Attendees were treated to a free screening at the park’s open theatre, joined by the movie’s director and cast.

The organizers distributed special “tissues for crybabies”, encouraging people to release their sorrows from the past year through tears.

People also shared hot mulled wine with others, with some dressing up as characters from the movie, turning the event into an unconventional way to bid farewell to the year.

At the event, director Tsai said that he had never imagined witnessing such a scene 30 years after the film’s release, even promising to return next year to continue the tradition.

“Even though it was billed as a crying countdown event, but actually people were quite happy,” an actress with the surname Chen told Almost. “By the end of the event, people had calmed down and were all cheering.”

Chen added that like Tsai said, she hoped that she could cry and laugh and countdown again with everyone next year.

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