Blind Nights

On Green Island’s Human Rights Memorial, a poem by Bo Yang mourns the mothers who wept through long nights for children imprisoned there during Taiwan’s White Terror. In Cries in the Dark, the filmmaker turns that line into family history. In 1950, their parents were arrested in the Yu Fei espionage case, convicted of rebellion, and sentenced to 13 and 10 years in prison. Their grandmother, desperate to save her newly married daughter and son-in-law, cried for help until she lost sight in one eye. Decades later, the case was officially recognized as a wrongful conviction: 34 people were implicated, four unrelated defendants were executed, and the rest received heavy sentences. Born while their mother was briefly released from prison, the filmmaker spent early childhood behind bars before being separated when she was sent to Green Island. The film records the intimate cost of political persecution across prison, family, and memory.