Movies: Hou Hsiao-hsien

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...

A substitute teacher from Taipei arrives in a country village to teach a class of mischievous students. He soon falls in love with nature, country life and a fellow teacher at the school....

Hsu Zi Qi is a young woman who lives alone in the city. Lee is the autistic son of Zi Qi's landlady, who tries to free himself from his protective mother. Feng is a shy young builder, who struggles with the constant breakdowns of his car....

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....

In three separate segments, set respectively in 1966, 1911, and 2005, three love stories unfold between three sets of characters, under three different periods of Taiwanese history and governance....

Lin Hsiao-yang tries to keep her family together while working as a waitress at Kentucky Fried Chicken and going to night school. With no mother and her father currently working out of town, it is up to Lin Hsiao-yang to take care of her younger sibl...

Master puppeteer Li Tien-lu recalls his life in Japanese-occupied Taiwan during the first half of the 20th century....

When a woman who was abandoned at birth because of a genetic disorder sees a child facing the same fate, she finds herself trying to persuade their parents to reconsider and goes to extreme lengths to save the child....

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....

Doris 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 turns the café into a burgeoning bartering business...

Oom has no papers or formal training but is good at caring for the elderly and disabled. When his situation as a caregiver in the mountains becomes too much for him, he has to choose between survival or dignity....

An actress preparing to play in a historical epic is terrorized by someone faxing her pages from her stolen diary; has colorful flashbacks of her affair with a now-deceased man; and imagines black-and-white film-within-a-film scenes of the movie she ...

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 mon...

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....

The story follows a young man as he changes from an intelligently aware youth, to a teenager with much less confidence than he once had, and finally, to a stable adult....

Set in the late 1980s, this family drama is about an 11-year-old boy who befriends his landlord, nicknamed Old Fox, and learns from him how to survive in a rapidly changing world as well as things his poor father would never be able to teach him....

One of Hong Kong's most influential filmmakers, Ann Hui, becomes a “star” for the first time in Man Lim-chung's directorial debut. A forerunner of the New Wave, Hui’s tumultuous, forty-year career is an unequivocal testimony to her unyielding dedicat...

The daughter of a wealthy man takes French lessons so she can go to France with her fiancée, but ends up falling for a poor man who studies civil engineering....

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 throu...

A photographer travels with her boyfriend to a seaside village in Penghu. There she strikes up a relationship with a blind man. When they reencounter one another back in Taipei, where he is preparing to undergo an operation to restore his sight, thei...