Hou Hsiao-hsien
“I Remember” tells the story of sister writers Chu Tien-wen and Chu Tien-xin, from co-founding the San-san magazine to their respective creative and political efforts up to the present.
Dancer SHEU Fang-yi’s career has been told through her modern dance dramas such as Sparrow, Stranger, Wall, and Martha GRAHAM‘s Heretic. Martha GRAHAM once said: “A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.” At this intersection of her life, SHEU Fang-yi commemorates her glorious past two decades with a funeral, to farewell her past self, and to get ready to move toward her unknown future.
Chu Tien-Wen, frequent screenwriter for Hou Hsiao-Hsien, makes her directorial debut with this entry in The Inspired Island documentary series. With Hou as producer, cinematographer Yao Hung-I and editor Liao ChingSung, Chu takes a deep dive into the story of her parents, famed authors Chu Hsi-Ning and Liu Mu-Sha. Through family albums, old letters and interviews with fellow writers, Chu crafts a deeply personal portrait of her parents’ romance, literary careers, family roots and the unfinished opus her father left behind.
On his 60th birthday, Van is told that he is seriously ill. But instead of going to Taipei for treatment, his illness leads him to Japan. Together with his son, he goes in search of the father who abandoned him 50 years ago. At the same time, a young man with a mysterious connection to Van's past is travelling from Hong Kong to Taiwan.
Hsu Zi-qi, who raises parrots in her apartment, keeps getting wrong phone calls for someone named Johnny. Lee, the autistic son of Zi-qi’s landlady, reads old newspapers every day and wanders around. Handyman Feng, who works odd jobs around the apartment, feels disheartened and frustrated when his beloved car breaks down. The lives of these three lonely souls cross over when one of Zi-qi’s parrots escapes one day. Johnny is missing, but he’s hardly the only one lost in the urban jungle of Taipei.
In 2013, the Golden Horse Film Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. The ministry of Culture commissioned director Yang Li-chou to make a documentary about the history of Golden Horse. What is unique to this film is that it's not an ode to celebrities but about the role cinema plays in ordinary people's lives. It's a love letter to cinema, filmmakers and audiences.
Yves Montmayeur takes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as the starting point for his study of the new female warrior in Asian pop culture. From Beijing to Tokyo and Taiwan, he went to meet with the most iconic muses of this new trend, including Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Shu Qi, and Asami.
A female assassin during the Tang Dynasty who begins to question her loyalties when she falls in love with one of her targets.
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.
Set in the island Kinmen, often seen as the most dangerous military base because it’s geographically close to China, "Paradise in Service" follows the adventure of a boy who serves his military service in Unit 831 from 1969 to 1972, in preparation for a war that could erupt anytime. Through an unlucky lottery draw result, Pao, a twenty-something young man from Southern Taiwan has to serve the military in the remote and perilous Kinmen. Moreover, he is assigned to the Sea Dragon (ARB), a unit noted for the toughest physical training. It never occurs to Pao, however, that the greatest challenge in his military service lies not in the Sea Dragon but in Unit 831, a special task he is later appointed to… In this peculiar assignment, Pao vows to keep his virginity against all odds.
Documenting Taiwan from an aerial perspective offering a glimpse of Taiwan's natural beauty as well as the effect of human activities and urbanization on our environment.
10+10 is a project initiated by the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival to demonstrate the solidarity between Taiwanese film-makers. 20 directors are invited to make a 5-minute short film each on the theme of the “Uniqueness of Taiwan,” but allowed total freedom in all other aspects.
All the way, Cao Li has come alone. From Fuyang to Shenzhen. From Shenzhen to Shanghai. From Shanghai to home? Leaving hometown is her choice, the choice out of no choice. Returning home is her dream, the dream getting blinded by the neon lights in the city.--
One of the best-known Chinese figurative painters, Liu Xiaodong goes back to his hometown of Jincheng, in the province of Liaoning (North-East China), to re-paint again friends and relatives after several years have gone by. With a soundtrack by famed composer Lim Giong (Millennium Mambo, The Assassin).
A woman is transported into a world as strange and beautiful as her dreams in this fantasy. Singing (Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh), who comes from a family of poor shopkeepers, earns her living as a cleaning woman on a ferry that services a military base. Singing has a recurring dream in which she meets a handsome stranger who speaks in language she cannot understand, and one day on the ferry she meets Tsai Hsien-tsung (Bryan Chang), a soldier who resembles the man in her dreams. The soldier is immediately smitten with Singing, and when the power goes out on the ferry, the two are thrown into a strange netherworld where they sail to South America on a deserted vessel as Singing loses her heart to the military man.
Focuses on the people, their stories and architecture spanning from the mid-1800s, when Shanghai was opened as a trading port, to the present day.
Doris (Guey Lun Mei) simply wanted to open a refined, stylish coffee shop in a bohemian Taipei neighborhood, but when she's stuck with a load of useless gifts from the opening celebration, her younger sister Josie (Lin Zaizai) turns the café into a burgeoning bartering business. There, even a soulful song (by Japanese singer Atari Kosuke in a cameo) is a tradable commodity. One day, a traveler (Ching Han) brings in 35 soaps from around the world with a story for each of them, awakening Doris' imagination about the outside world that she has never seen.
Focusing on Mark Lee Ping-bin, one of the most talented and prolific cinematographers in Asia, the movie details the itinerant lifestyle of a deeply observant and philosophical artist and the tolls that his profession takes on his family life.
Pascal Lamorisse is the son of filmmaker Albert Lamorisse. He is also the little hero of some of his father's films (White Mane, The Red Balloon and Stowaway in the Sky). Over the years, Albert Lamorisse, who took his son on all his shoots, sought to transmit his expertise and his passion for filmmaking, even on his last film, The Lover's Wind. There is something in the story of Pascal Lamorisse that touches on a fabulous story: it is the story of the transmission of cinema from father to child.
Chinese film school students and the professors from the Greater China Region gathered together at Hong Kong Baptist University to discuss the many serious film issues in the region.
The first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d'Orsay, 'Flight of the Red Balloon' tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's first Western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse.
A family in 1940s Taiwan goes to see a film in a suddenly abandoned or decrepit theatre.
A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.
There are three stories of women and men: in "A Time for Love" set in 1966, a soldier searches for a young woman he met one afternoon playing pool; "A Time for Freedom," set in a bordello in 1911, revolves around a singer's longing to escape her surroundings; in "A Time for Youth" set in 2005 Taipei, a triangle in which a singer has an affair with a photographer while her partner suffers is dramatized. In the first two stories, letters are crucial to the outcome; in the third, it's cell-phone calls, text messages, and a computer file. Over the years between the tales, as sexual intimacy becomes more likely and words more free, communication recedes.
Making her way through life by forming superficial relationships, Yoko keeps everyone at arm's length, whether it's her father and stepmother or Hajime, the owner of a small bookstore who could be the father of her unborn child. Yoko seems most at home when she's riding the train, speeding around the city with only her thoughts to entertain her.
Richly illustrated with film clips and interviews, OUR TIME, OUR STORY tells the still-evolving story of the Taiwanese "new wave," from its rise in the early 1980s, as the island was democratizing after decades under martial law, through growing international recognition and domestic debate in the 1990s. Spearheaded in its early years by such filmmakers as Edward Yang, Ko I-cheng, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wan Jen, the movement revitalized Taiwan cinema through low-budget experiments that emphasized personal stories, political reflection and stylistic invention. Said filmmakers, writers and actors like Wu Nien-jen and Sylvia Chang, even "second wave" directors Tsai Ming-liang and Lin Cheng-sheng provide fond reminiscences and retrospective insights in this compelling account of one of the most distinctive national cinemas of the last quarter-century.
Tung-Ching’s life has changed since a car accident three months ago. The lifeline on his right hand was scratched off in this incident. A nurse told him that his life is no longer controlled by fate but has become unpredictable since then. Three months later, Tung-Ching’s father has suffered a stroke so he has to take over the family pawnshop. His girlfriend, Eiko, who is interested in palm reading, wants to retrieve Tung-Ching’s lifeline. However, Tung-Ching is apathetic to know what the future holds. He starts to flirt with one of his female customers who he names her “ Know-all”.
Taipei. A voice off-camera looks back ten years to 2000, when Vicky was in an on-again off-again relationship with Hao-Hao...
Entry on Taiwanese new-wave filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien for French television's "Cinéma, de notre temps" series, directed by Olivier Assayas.
Women struggle in a Shanghai brothel where everything only appears to be beautiful.
This highly personal film essay demonstrates that Chinese cinema has dealt with questions of gender and sexuality more frankly and provocatively than any other national cinema. Yang ± Yin examines male bonding and phallic imagery in the swordplay and kung fu movies of the '60s and '70s; homosexuality; same-sex bonding and physical intimacy; the continuing emphasis on women's grievances in melodramas; and the phenomenon of Yam Kim-Fai, a Hong Kong actress who spent her life portraying men on and off the screen.
Gao (Jack Kao) is riding the train to Pinghsi to set up a 10 day gambling den with his friend Hsi (Hsi Hsiang).
Sega's children, born into post-war Chinese rule, can't relate to their father's love for Japanese culture, having grown up under Japanese rule before WWII.
Intended as the concluding film in the trilogy on the modern history of Taiwan began with Beiqing Chengshi (1989), this film reveals the story through three levels: a film within a film as well as the past and present as linked by a young woman, Liang Ching. She is being persecuted by an anonymous man who calls her repeatedly but does not speak. He has stolen her diary and faxes her pages daily. Liang is also rehearsing for a new film that is due to go into production soon. The film, entitled Haonan Haonu, is about a couple Chiang Bi-yu and Chung Hao-tung who returns to China to participate in the anti-Japanese movement in China in the 1940s and are arrested as communists when they go back to Taiwan.
In the first half of this century, young Li Tienlu joins a travelling puppet theatre and subsequently makes a career as one of Taiwan's leading puppeteers.
From the 1980s to the 1990s, New Taiwanese Cinema gained international attention for adopting a completely different approach to that of the commercial films which had preceded it. This piece contrasts Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, two rivals who were the driving force behind New Taiwanese Cinema. The closing of a cinema invites us to reflect on society and the passage of history.
A group of young Taipei residents is drawn into the city’s underworld through the growing obsession of one, the boyish Ah-feng, for the sexy Cantonese mistress of a gang boss.
A tribute to the legendary Japanese film director featuring the reflections of filmmakers Lindsay Anderson, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Aki Kaurismäki, Stanley Kwan, Paul Schrader, and Wim Wenders
A-kuo and A-tou are teen-aged boys living in an industrial town in Taiwan. When they are not in school, they generally hang out with their buddy Hsiao Kao, a very stylish and charismatic younger gangster who enjoys their company and support. When one of Hsia Kao's gangland patrons is gunned down, the trio set out to revenge the killing. As a result, the two teens are forced into hiding. One boy tells his dad he wants to go to America, which nearly kills the old man. The other just lays low. When things cool down a bit, they head on up to Taipei, looking for their gangster friend and sampling the gritty pleasures of the capital city's underworld and nightlife. - Clarke Fountain, Rovi
China in the 1920s. After her father's death, 19 year old Songlian is forced to marry the much older lord of a powerful family. With three wives already, each living in a separate house within the great castle, there is fierce competition for his attention and the privileges that are gained. This competition gets out of hand...
Two independent stories involving chess wizards are interwoven to satirize the politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as well as Taiwan's capitalist boom of the 1970's.
Soon after Japan relinquishes control of Taiwan in 1945, the Lin brothers face hardships from the changing culture. Bar owner Wen-heung, the eldest brother, falls foul of local gangsters, Wen-sun disappears, and Wen-leung, scarred by his experiences in the war, ends up in an insane asylum. Deaf-mute photographer Wen-ching, the youngest brother, decides to make a stand and fight the Kuomintang government from China that is assuming power.
The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.
Ip Cheung and her husband, a senior police inspector, had been happily married for 18 years. One day, Ip runs into her neighbour, a Taiwanese woman. As they are talking, three men suddenly appeared and tried to kill them. The Taiwanese woman is killed but Ip and the kid, Yen, managed to escape. At the same time, Ip's husband commits suicide. His superior suspected him of corruption. Ip finds out that the Taiwanese woman was her husband's mistress and Yen, his illegitimate son. Ip is given custody of Yen but they are unable to get along. However she will save his live when the gang go after him.
A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.
Bi Bao-Liang is a 29 year-old man who believes that he will have bad luck if he touches a woman before he turns thirty. Liu Xiang-mei is a beautiful woman who had a love affair with her married boss, and now she is pregnant. In order to give her child a family name, she decides to find a man to have a one-year marriage contract. Bi Bao-Liang is the perfect man she is looking for because he is afraid of women. However, their marriage does not follow what they've planned...
A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.
The semi-autobiographical film on director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's childhood and adolescence, when he was growing up in Taiwan.
A boy fell in love with a girl, then the girl left. Years later, the boy found that he is a father now.
A coming-of-age story about a young brother and sister whom spend a pivotal summer in the country with their grandparents.
Growing Up was the film that "first attracted broad critical and popular attention to the movement" known as New Taiwan Cinema. It "established some of the movement's key stylistic approaches and narrative concerns, with its subdued manner in relating the story of an adolescent boy grappling with everyday pangs amid Taiwan's fraught provincial context."
Composed of three separate stories, the film vividly portrays Taiwan during the cold war period when the country developed its economy with help from the United States.
Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.
Da-Nian is a young man from Taipei. He goes to a remote village and works as a substitute teacher. He and Su-Yun, another teacher at the school, fall in love. There are several students in his class who are like the naughty "three musketeers", and a sad, silent boy Xiang-Wang, who's parents are divorced. Besides, in order to support the family, Xian-Wang's father kills the fish in the river with electricity, which is against the law and causes a lot of damage to the natural resources. Because of this, Xian-Wang has been teased by other school children. At last, he becomes so upset and runs away from home...
Kenny Bee plays a saxophonist who works in a night club. Fang Hui-jang is the oldest sister in a four-child family whose father is working abroad. They are forced to live together in a house because they are fooled by a cheater who pretends to be the owner of the house they rent and runs away after taking both their rents. This love comedy begins after this couple lives together. —Anonymous
A romantic drama about a blind man and a somewhat self-indulgent television producer.
Longing. A taiwanese film directed by Kun-Hou Chen and written by Hsiao-Hsien Hou.
The daughter of a rich man, Wen helps out with her father’s business and also takes French lessons so that she can go to France with her fiancé. But she falls in love with a poor young man, Da-gang, who is studying civil engineering. Clashing with her father, she decides to leave home and go and stay with her aunt in the countryside. On a peaceful country road, she meets Da-gang again, who happens to be working there. Their relationship can now blossom. Later, when they get married and Wen gets pregnant, it turns out Da-gang also comes from a rich family…
A loose youth passes the time freely until he comes across a young, female broadcaster who works at a radio station.
A romance about a girl who falls in love and marries a music teacher. The couple struggle through life as the man does not want to accept money from his rich father.
Zhijie, in her bid to find a wife for her mentally-challenged son, found Chu Lien to become her daughter-in-law. From then, Chu Lien's life becomes miserable, constantly being physically abused. Fortunately, Shun-hsing took pity on her, both of them quietly exchange solemn vows to each other...
Chao Ta-jung and Yuan-yuan met at the seashore by chance. Ta-jung was impressed with Yuan-yuan's compassion towards those who were less unfortunate even though she had given him a hard time. They soon fell in love and decided to get married but due to Yuan-yuan's heart problem, there is a possibility that she may not conceive.
Taking place in modern-day Taipei, Hou Hsiao-Hsien focuses on a lonely river goddess whose waterways have now been covered by modern roadways.
This is a story of reminiscence, remembering my long-deceased Grandpa. To remember is to transcend, therefore it’s a story of time and space, overlapped and intertwined. It’s also a quest of love and work, a spiritual and emotional journey; and through which values are re-examined and life reaffirmed.
Stepping into the beautiful yet realistic behind-the-scenes world of "Flowers of Shanghai," the story here breathes and unfolds naturally and organically...the art director purchasing antiques and props at an old flea market, arranging exquisite embroidery and colors to recreate the daily life of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty out of thin air; the cinematographer meticulously sculpting light and shadow to capture the gradation of faint light imprinted on the films. Interweaving the recollections of these individuals, this classic film has come to life again. This film uses behind-the-scene footage from 20 years ago and interweaves it with stories about the film's pre-production, production, and post-production. This film spans time and space, featuring interviews with such long-time Hou collaborators as Huang Wen-yin, Mark Lee, Tu Du Chih, and Liao Ching-sung. It gives us an intimate look at a master at work and the creation of a seductive, timeless work of cinema.
In 1989, the disparity between the rich and poor in Taiwan grew with the turbulent stock market.
