Movies: Hou Hsiao-hsien

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....

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...

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 rela...

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....

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....

An exploration of Chinese cinema and its relationships with gender and sexuality, which the film argues has been more frankly and provocatively explored than in any other national cinema. Utilizing both film excerpts and interviews with many leading ...

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....

Jin is in her 60s. Her husband gone, her concern is for daughter Zuer, in New York trying out IVF with her partner Michelle. When Jin receives news that Zuer and Michelle have died in an accident, she heads for NY. There, she has another shock: she h...

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...

In this portrait of small-time hoods rendered in rhythm-of-life anecdotal detail, Gao is the leader of a circle of layabouts including his sidekick, Flathead, and their girlfriends, Pretzel and Ling. He is also the originator of petty crime schemes, ...

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....

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....

A couple is torn by conflicting emotions. Jing and Mi are two women living in Taiwan who have been lovers for some time; Jing is a singer in a rock band who suffers from severe mood swings and has been suffering from a fractured relationship with her...

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-Guo and A-Dou are two teenagers living in an industrial town in Taiwan, who fight, loaf, and cause trouble all day and hang out with Jie, a young gangster. When Jie's gangland patron is gunned down, the trio set out to revenge the killing. As a res...

Teenagers Jielong and Tangmi secretly love each other, but Tangmi vanishes after they spend a night out together. Jielong has to turn back to focus on his studies and enter university. Unexpectedly, Tangmi resurfaces with a newborn baby....

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....

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 pa...

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 ...

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 tot...