Three Times marks Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien's sixth bid for the Cannes Palme d'Or. In 1993, he was awarded the Jury Prize for The Puppetmaster; his Good Men, Good Women was chosen for screening in the Official Selection in 1995, as were Goodbye, South Goodbye (1996), Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and Millennium Mambo (2001), the film where European audiences discovered actress Shu Qi, a star in Asia. Shu Qi takes the leading role in today's Three Times, alongside Chang Chen, an actor who, as a teenager, starred in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991), and whose career has continued with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and 2046.

Three Times relates a series of three love stories which, although they take place at different points in time (1966, 1911 and 2005), are played by the same couple of actors (Shu Qi and Chang Chen). "It seems to me that by contrasting love stories from three different times, we can feel how people's behavior is circumscribed by the times and places they live in," explained Hou Hsiao Hsien. This work, whose Chinese title would literally be translated "Our Best Moments", happens to draw upon the director's own memories. He confided: "Now I'm pushing sixty, and these things have been hanging around for so long it seems like they're part of me. Maybe the only way I can discharge my debt to them is to film them."

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Hou Hsiao Hsien's latest title Three Times has been named Best Taiwanese Film of the Year in the Golden Horse Film Awards 2005, and Shu Qi took home the Best Actress award for this film. She and Chang Chen each play three different roles in three love stories that are reincarnations of each other. The three episodes, "A Time of Love", "A Time for Freedom", and "A Time for Youth", each document a period in Taiwanese history. Bygones in our memories are always the best of times - this may be the underlying theme of the three vignettes in Three Times. These fragmentary memories bear no name, nor belong to any categories, but they are the best of times that lodge in our mind.

In "A Time of Love", set in 1966, a young man who is about to enter the military service falls in love with a girl working in a parlor. She disappears when he returns from holiday, so he begins the search... The parlor and the popular song Smoke Gets in Your Eyes all reminds us of the influence of American culture in Taiwan in the late 50s.

"A Time for Freedom" sidetracks the conflicts and tensions during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. A female courtesan meets a man who is promoting freedom of Taiwan from the Japanese occupation, and she starts to wonder about her own freedom, too. The segment's silent film format is another remembrance of the old cinematic form.

The third episode "A Time for Youth" is a tale happening in Taipei in 2005, in which a bisexual young woman who suffers from epilepsy falls in love with a photographer in a printing shop. In a disordered contemporary city, what remains in a triangular love relation is only confusion...