In this day of multiplexes and 3-D projection, the Chuan Mei theatre in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan is a reminder of the way movie-going used to be.
Instead of computer-generated tickets and plush-sofa-like seats, patrons are given hand-stamped pieces of paper indicating the time of their performance and seated on simple metal chairs.
But the theatre’s most eye-catching pieces of nostalgia hang above the entrance: Hand-painted movie posters, three metres square, illustrate the daily bill of fare.
On a recent weekday morning, Yan was sitting in his makeshift studio on the sidewalk in front of the theatre, working on an action-packed poster advertising the apocalyptic blockbuster World War Z.
“The key is you have to recognise the special features of the person,” he explains, taking time off from his painstaking rendering of megastar Brad Pitt, the film’s leading man. “We have to enlarge the painting from a smaller original, so you have to know how to scale the picture first.”