General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

At Cafe 6 (六弄咖啡馆)

At Cafe 6 (六弄咖啡馆) is a 2016 Taiwanese romance drama film directed by Wu Tzu-yun (吴子云), the bestselling novelist better known by his pen name Fujii Shu (藤井树), and adapted from his own novel of the same title. It was his first feature film as a director.¹^•² The film runs 103 minutes in Mandarin and stars Dong Zijian, Cherry Ngan (颜卓灵), Austin Lin (林柏宏), Ouyang Nini, and Song Yiren, with Leon Dai and Chang Jung-ju in the frame story.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and source	Wu Tzu-yun (Fujii Shu), directing his first feature, adapted from his own bestselling novel¹^•⁴
Screenwriters	Wu Tzu-yun, Cheng Yuan-cheng, Ho Su-fen, and Liao Ming-yi¹
Release	Taiwan July 2016; mainland China July 29, 2016⁵
Taiwan box office	NT$68,504,670 over its run; NT$20,322,829 and 86,506 admissions in Taipei, third among 2016 domestic films there¹^•⁶
Main award	Austin Lin, Best Supporting Actor at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards (2016)¹
Source novel	Sold over 320,000 copies in Taiwan; voted first in an online poll for the Chinese-language novel readers most wanted adapted into a film⁷
Mainland box office	6.54 million yuan (28.66 million New Taiwan dollars) as of November 16, 2023⁵

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in 1996, when the joint college entrance examination looms. Third-year high school student Guan Minlü, called Xiaolü, seems indifferent to the exam and spends his days getting into trouble, while his two attachments are his mother, who raised him alone, and Li Xinrui, the high-achieving classmate he has secretly loved for two years. His close friend Xiao Bozhi engineers a double date with Xinrui and her friend Cai Xinyi, and the four grow close.¹

Minlü and Xinrui drift into a relationship. With one hundred days left before the exam, she promises they will set off fireworks together if he gets into university; he studies hard while she tutors him, though she fears the uncertainties of a long-distance relationship. After Minlü and Bozhi fight hoodlums to protect a female schoolmate and end up at a police station, the couple reconcile, and Minlü turns down another girl's confession, saying Xinrui is the only one he likes.¹

Minlü fails the exam and stays behind while Xinrui goes north to university in Taipei. He takes jobs and converts his time and money into train tickets for regular visits south-to-north; the distance between them is about 360 kilometers. Xinrui works part-time in a cafe, develops a dream of opening one of her own, and grows more outgoing as an assistant to a senior in the magic club. When she calls in panic after being robbed near her campus, Minlü's reply, that she has already reported to the police so his coming changes nothing, wounds her need for company, and the two begin to diverge.¹

To make up, Minlü and Bozhi ride a scooter north on a typhoon day when trains have stopped, only to see Xinrui escorted back to her dormitory by the magic-club senior. At a confrontation in the cafe, Xinrui tells him their thinking has already diverged while he only denies reality. That night Minlü receives a phone call with the final blow: his mother has died of illness and he missed her last moments.¹

Three months after the funeral, Minlü appears unannounced at a dinner with Bozhi and Xinrui, says goodbye to Bozhi, and takes Xinrui to the sea to keep the fireworks promise. She answers his question about a second chance by saying that if they had grown together, the outcome might have been different. The frame story then closes in 2016: Bozhi, now the owner of the Cafe 6, reads an old letter in Minlü's handwriting. It is a suicide note; after that night by the sea, Minlü never left it, choosing to accompany his mother forever on the last day of his youth.¹

The framing device gives the film its title. On a rainy night, Miss Liang, whose car has broken down after a fight with her long-distance boyfriend, takes shelter in a coffee shop whose address is not on any Liuong (Sixth Lane) but which is named Cafe 6; the owner, Mr. Guan, tells her the story of his own high-school summer.³ The film's tagline explains the metaphor: life is like walking down a lane, and every turn (nong) may be another exit.⁸

Production

Wu Tzu-yun spent six years preparing the adaptation and described the cutting of his own novel as painful: elements he wanted to keep could not always fit the film, even as he tried to add new possibilities on top of the original story.⁴ Principal photography began in April 2015 in Taipei with Dong Zijian in the lead.⁹ The production companies included Hao Hao Film Studio and CTI Entertainment, with Color Tree Media handling shooting and post-production; distribution in Taiwan was by Hualian International.¹

Locations. As a Kaohsiung native, Wu placed about two-thirds of the film's scenes in the Kaohsiung area, drawing on his own memories, and moved the setting north to Taipei, Keelung, and Yilan as the characters enter university.¹⁰ In Taipei the production filed six street-closure applications, the most of any film the Taipei Film Commission had assisted up to that time; the artificial-rain scene on Fujin Street was the commission's largest, costing nearly NT$200,000 for special-effects work, a 45-ton crane, and large truss rigging.⁷ The title cafe was filmed at Muya Coffee on Yitong Street in Zhongshan District, a location chosen only after the production's first-choice cafe could not accommodate shooting; a second cafe, the fictional "Orange September" where Xinrui works, also appears.¹¹

Casting. The Taiwan Film Institute's yearbook notes that although the story is set mainly in southern Taiwan, funding structure and market considerations led to mainland and Hong Kong actors, Dong Zijian and Cherry Ngan, in the lead roles, with Taiwanese actors Austin Lin and Ouyang Nini in the second leads.¹² The film also added a character absent from the novel, Song Yiren, a classmate who quietly loves Minlü, and placed Minlü and Bozhi at the same university and dormitory, where the novel had them at different schools.¹⁰

Marketing and release

The distributors ran a visually oriented campaign aimed at young audiences: illustrator "Dinner" painted the four lead actors on a large white wall in a restored military-dependents' village, a time-lapse job that took 2 days and 16 hours in total, and a full-scale set of the film's coffee shop was built in a department store plaza.¹³ The theme song was performed by Stefanie Sun (孙燕姿).⁸ In Hong Kong, the film was distributed by Fox, the studio's second local release of a Taiwanese film after You Are the Apple of My Eye; in its opening week it earned HK$2.05 million, the best result among seven new releases in a slow season.¹⁴^•¹⁵

Reception and box office

In Taipei the film earned NT$20,322,829 from 86,506 admissions, ranking third among 2016 domestic films behind The Tenants Downstairs and The Godfather of Taiwan 2; nationally it grossed about NT$68.5 million, and the Ministry of Culture's report listed it among the year's commercially successful adaptations of bestselling literary IP.⁶^•¹⁶ Mirror Media counted it among the year's few Taiwanese productions that did not lose money.¹⁷ On the mainland it opened on July 29, 2016 and grossed 6.54 million yuan (28.66 million New Taiwan dollars) as of November 16, 2023.⁵

Awards. Austin Lin won Best Supporting Actor at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards for his role as Xiao Bozhi.¹ In 2017 the film received the award for the co-production most popular with audiences on both sides of the strait at the ninth Cross-Strait Film and TV Season.⁵

Critical response. Reviewers frequently measured the film against You Are the Apple of My Eye (2011), which likewise had its novelist author direct his own material. The Taiwan Film Institute's yearbook observed that the casting of mainland and Hong Kong leads in a southern-Taiwan story was hard for some local audiences to accept, even granting the leads' evident effort with accent and physicality.¹² The Hong Kong critic Fong Chun-kit of HK01 argued that casting the unglamorous Dong Zijian opposite Cherry Ngan made the story more relatable than glossier entries in the genre, and credited the film with engaging the subject of death and suicide more seriously than a typical youth romance, particularly through its ending.¹⁸ Others were harsher: a Ming Pao Weekly review called it formulaic and derivative, rating it two and a half stars.¹⁹ A Medium review attributed the film's commercial and critical underperformance to a flat, episodic translation of the novel's plot into images with little dramatic shaping.²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2015 to 2016 › Titles symbols to J

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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