General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Winds of September (九降风)

Winds of September (九降風) is a 2008 Taiwanese coming-of-age drama directed by Tom Lin Shu-yu (林書宇), his first feature film, set in Hsinchu in 1996 and following seven high school boys and two high school girls whose friendship dissolves against the backdrop of Taiwan's professional baseball game-fixing scandal¹^•². It was the first installment of a trilogy of youth films made from the same story concept in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China³.

Key fact	Detail
Release	6 June 2008 in Taiwan; Mandarin; 35mm color¹
Director and writers	Tom Lin Shu-yu; screenplay by Lin and Tsai Tsung-han (蔡宗翰)¹
Producers	Yeh Jufeng (葉如芬) and Eric Tsang (曾志偉); production companies Wei Image Film and Film Mall (影市堂)¹
Setting	Hsinchu, 1996, during the Chinese Professional Baseball League game-fixing scandal involving the China Times Eagles²^•⁴
Cast	Rhydian Vaughan (鳳小岳), Chang Chieh (張捷), Jennifer Chu (初家晴), Wang Bo-chieh (王柏傑), Chiu Yi-cheng (邱翊橙), and others; Eric Tsang appears¹
Major awards	Golden Horse Award for Best Original Screenplay (2008); Shanghai International Film Festival Asian Newcomer Award for Best Film; four Taipei Film Festival awards¹
Taiwan box office	NT$7.73 million total per the Taiwan Cinema Yearbook; a National Taiwan University survey lists NT$4,580,950 in Taipei and NT$9,160,000 nationwide⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Title and story

The Chinese title refers to the strong wind that blows in Hsinchu during the ninth month of the lunar calendar; IMDb describes it as a wind visiting the county and city between September and November, and an industry report calls "Jiu Jiang Feng" an old Hakka term for that seasonal wind⁷^•⁸.

The story follows a gang of seven high school boys in Hsinchu who spend their time chasing girls, smoking, drinking beer, sneaking out for late-night skinny dipping, and rooting for their favorite baseball team². Yen (Rhydian Vaughan) is the group's charismatic leader; the quieter Tang (Chang Chieh) secretly loves Yen's girlfriend Yun (Jennifer Chu)². A beating, a traffic accident, and suspicions of betrayal test the group's camaraderie, and its dissolution is mirrored by the fortunes of the baseball team as the match-fixing scandal breaks⁹. Director Lin used the scandal as a metaphor for the end of innocence, with news reports on the prosecution of China Times Eagles players paralleling the breakup of the friends².

The film is built from period detail: KTV rental shops, BB call pagers, NSR motorcycles, and the closing song "I Look Forward To" (我期待) by Chang Yu-sheng, who died in 1997 after a car accident². A film analysis from Young Voice Film School notes that it weaves the evolution of Taiwanese professional baseball and media culture into a multi-character growth story, recreating the social atmosphere of those years¹⁰.

Origins and writing

Lin conceived the script in 2004 as a record of his own youth and later invited screenwriter Tsai Tsung-han to collaborate. Lin graduated high school in 1994 but deliberately moved the story's timeframe forward three years to pair it with the baseball scandal; Tsai, three years younger, was in high school in 1997, so he handled the characters' language and period pop culture with greater precision³. The two worked by exchanging drafts: Lin wrote a detailed scene outline, Tsai converted it into dialogue and action, and the script was refined through repeated back-and-forth passes³.

The nine lead roles were written from the personalities of Lin's own high school friends, and the director cast young actors whose existing personalities already matched the characters by what he estimated at 60 to 70 percent³. A later account notes that the nine protagonists are students at Zhudong High School in 1996, while Lin himself grew up in Hsinchu in 1993 and 1994 and screenwriter Tsai's own high school years were 1996 and 1997¹¹. Filming took place mainly at Zhudong High School in Hsinchu County; the original plan was to shoot at Lin's own alma mater, the National Experimental High School in Hsinchu City, but its classrooms were too new to convey a 1990s look¹².

Financing and production

The project received a NT$5 million subsidy from the 2006 new-talent category of Taiwan's film guidance fund. Producer Yeh Jufeng then sought matching investment from Taiwan's Mei Ah company and was refused, leaving the plan stalled. Lin passed the script to Eric Tsang through Bowie Tsang (曾寶儀); Tsang was greatly impressed but could not persuade Mei Ah to invest either, so he founded Film Mall (影市堂), which together with Taiwan's Wei Image Film (威像電影) contributed NT$6 million each to the production⁵. After completion, Tsang's connections sold the distribution rights to Mei Ah, and the film was distributed in Taiwan by Atom Cinema (原子映象)⁵^•¹.

Despite the Hong Kong money involved, the yearbook characterizes the film as an authentically Taiwanese production: a Taiwanese crew and cast telling a purely Taiwanese story, with the Hong Kong partnership helping its marketing in Hong Kong and mainland China⁵.

The Winds of September trilogy

Before shooting began, Eric Tsang saw the script's audience appeal and invited directors from mainland China and Hong Kong to each make a youth film based on the same story, forming a three-film "Winds of September" project³. The Hong Kong version, High Noon (烈日當空), was directed by Heiward Mak (麥曦茵) and set in 2008, dealing with contemporary phenomena such as compensated dating and self-shot images spread online¹³^•¹⁴. The Taiwan chapter is identified in international circulation as Winds of September – The Taiwan Chapter¹⁵.

Release, box office, and festivals

The film premiered at the 2008 Hong Kong International Film Festival and opened in Taiwan on 6 June 2008¹²^•¹. Its initial run was modest, but after Cape No. 7 drew crowds to Taiwanese films that autumn, theaters requested a re-release, and the film returned to Vieshow cinemas from 19 September 2008, paired with Lin's award-winning short The Pain of Others (海巡尖兵)⁵^•¹⁶. Within two weeks the Xinyi Vieshow and Hsinchu FE21 Vieshow screens together passed NT$1 million in ticket sales, with the Xinyi location alone exceeding 5,000 admissions, and additional theaters in Ximending, Kaohsiung, and Taichung joined the re-release¹⁶.

On the festival circuit the film toured widely through 2008: it screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, won the Asian Newcomer Award for Best Film at the Shanghai International Film Festival, was the only Taiwanese film at the Toronto International Film Festival, and appeared at Melbourne, Hawaii, Busan (A Window on Asian Cinema), Tokyo (Winds of Asia), and Thessaloniki¹^•¹⁶. At the Tokyo festival the cast met Japanese director Shunji Iwai in an elevator and invited the audience to sing happy birthday to producer Yeh Jufeng¹⁷.

Awards

The film won the Golden Horse Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2008, the Shanghai International Film Festival's Asian Newcomer Award for Best Film, and at the 2008 Taipei Film Festival took the Media Recommendation Award, Best New Actor (Wang Bo-chieh), Best Screenplay (Tsai Tsung-han), and the Jury Special Prize¹. It was later nominated for Best Screenplay at the 33rd Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2009¹.

Reception and place in Taiwanese cinema

Critics placed the film in the lineage of 1980s Taiwanese New Wave cinema. A UCLA review called it one of the more impressive debuts in recent Taiwanese cinema and read its baseball motif, as in Edward Yang's Taipei Story, as an allegory for a generation's entry into adulthood, with Hou Hsiao-hsien's Dust in the Wind appearing in a cameo¹⁸. The Taipei Times judged it a neatly executed, well-structured drama about friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and disillusionment, though formulaic². LoveHKFilm called it a solid production and a fine second feature for Lin, noting his command of the Taiwan Cinema house style of picturesque settings, sharp cinematography, and slow pacing¹⁵.

A retrospective essay groups Winds of September with Cape No. 7 and Orz Boyz as the three 2008 debut features by Lin, Wei Te-sheng, and Yang Ya-che that gave Taiwanese cinema a visible lift at the end of a long box-office trough¹⁹. Audience commentary on Rotten Tomatoes has noted it as a quality bittersweet coming-of-age Taiwanese film that predates You Are the Apple of My Eye²⁰. The film's standing has endured: in 2025 the Paris Taiwan Film Festival screened it alongside Lin's later work to show his creative development, with Lin remarking that in making it he was young and self-absorbed, declaring the world's problems to adults, while sixteen years later he sought the social responsibility of an adult in his newer films²¹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026