Winner of Best New Talent and Audience Favorite Film at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival 2008 It’s Mother’s Day in Taipei and what starts off as Chen Mo’s simple desire to buy a cake for his wife turns into one incredibly long and tumultuous night. Chen’s marriage has been on the rocks and his hope is that a dinner date, complete with dessert, will set things right,. While Chen is inside trying to buy a cake, a car double parks next to his, thus blocking his exit. From this point forward, Taiwanese director Mong-Hong Chung unfolds his dark, surreal, at times funny, and complicated story. Chen’s single goal becomes finding the owner of the blasted double-parked vehicle. While searching the nearest apartment building floor by floor, he discovers a cast of characters: a barbershop owner with one arm whose activity that night is cooking fish head soup, a prostitute from the Chinese mainland who’s trying to flee from her pimp, and a Hong Kong tailor captured by his debtors, among other unsavory but likeable types. Chang tackles the lead role with cool, and Kao and To definitely add depth. The encounters are surreal, the conversations immediately bizarre, too intimate, and lead to one misunderstanding after another. And while PARKING takes place exclusively on the same city block, the movie is given movement via flashbacks that give insight into the characters’ backgrounds. The tones and the dialogues of each scene switch quickly, and viewers will have to adjust to the abrupt shifts. In fact, the scenes play much like Ho Ping’s “The Rules of the Game,” with which American audiences are more likely to be familiar. While the motif of dawn offering a new day is completely obvious, it works since not just Chen, but all the characters are looking for the sun to rise on their collective dilemmas. After half a day spent looking for a simple solution to a simple urban annoyance, Chen is left thinking “What a long, strange trip it’s been."