When Huang Hsin-yao was just starting to pick up a camera in 1998, he pointed it at his four best friends from school. Over the course of seven years, he captured their growth from young army cadets to men with serious jobs and their own families. Together, they smoked, gambled, shared scooter seats and shot the breeze at their favourite tea joints. Shot with the intimacy of home videos but featuring the same type of sardonic humour and melancholy of his later films, Huang’s most personal and funniest documentary served as the basis for Classmates Minus, his second fiction film.