The Boys from Fengkuei (Chinese: 風櫃來的人), also known as All the Youthful Days, is a 1983 Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien.
[1] It was Hou Hsiao-hsien's first art film after he directed three light comedies in the early eighties and a representative work of the Taiwan New Cinema at its inception.
Ah-ching, whose father is disabled due to a brain injury, fools around with his friends Ah-rong, Kuo-zai, and Ah-yu in their island fishing village, Fengkuei (風櫃).
They go to Kuo-zai's uncle's house on the sea shore in Neipo (內坡) to hide and have a good time, but they are eventually brought to the police station for their crimes.
Thanks to Huang Jin-he, a friend of Ah-rong's sister who lives in the same building across from their room, Ah-ching and Kuo-zai successfully get jobs at the electronics processing factory.
When Ah-rong tries to stop him because the price is too lower to make a profit, Ah-ching tells him not to have any reservations because "Kuo-zai is going to do military service in two days!
Thanks to screenwriter Chu Tʽien-wen's recommendation, Hou Hsiao-hsien took inspiration from Shen Congwen's (沈從文) autobiography to keep a longer distance from the subjects in the film in order to have a broader view.
[1] During the editing stage, Hou Hsiao-hsien once fell into writer's block and did not know how to cut the film with Liao Ching-Sung (廖慶松).
After watching Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle, he realized that he could be free about the narrative as long as the feel is right.
[2] This soundtrack of the film was originally a namesake song in rock-n-roll style composed and sung by popular singer Jonathan Lee (李宗盛).