Ming-liang Tsai

On the last night before the old movie theater is shut down, a Japanese youth, despite the hard rain, comes running into the theater. The theater seems empty, void of life; yet there are some people, and some may not be people... (Wellspring Media)

This metaphysical meditation on the anomie of modern urban life focuses on the problems of a family in Taipei. (KimStim)

When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a girl on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches Francois Truffaut's Les 400 Coups, she has a strange encounter with its now-ageing star (Jean-Pierre Leaud). (imdb)

The film focuses on three city folks who unknowingly share the same apartment: Mei, a real estate agent who uses it for her sexual affairs; Ah-jung, her current lover; and Hsiao-ang, who's stolen the key and uses the apartment as a retreat. (imdb)

Hsiao-Kang, now working as an adult movie actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.

A girl (Shiang-chyi Chen) looks for a street vendor in Taipei. But she can't find him since the Skywalk is Gone. (imdb)

In the final days of the year 1999, most everyone in Taiwan has died. A strange plague has ravished the island. Supposedly spread by cockroaches, the disease sends its victims into a psychosis where they act like the insects. Eventually, they die. The Hole takes place in a crumbling apartment building. Its two protagonists live right above and below each other. The woman is on the lower floor, and the pipes above her apartment are leaking fiercely, threatening to destroy her food supply... (imdb)

Hsiao Kang is a troubled student. Ah Tze and Ah Bing are petty criminals. During a random act of violence on the streets of Taipei, their stories intermingle...

Hsaio-Kang (Kang-sheng Lee) is beaten up by street hustlers and is carried back to a abandoned half-completed building, home to the homeless and downtrodden, by a group of Bangladeshi men. There he is meticulously, even lovingly, brought back to health by Rawang (Norman Bin Atun), where they share a salvaged, stained flea-ridden mattress... (IMDB Comments)

The city of São Paulo, as seen through the lenses of 13 directors. (imdb)

The original subject intended for this film was a spiritual medium who was unbelievably accurate. Tsai Ming-liang jumped on his 50cc motorbike, equipped with a DV camera ready to shoot her, to see whether the god would speak to his camera. But on the way, he was caught in a traffic jam of people gathered at another god's festival. A man in a trance, flashy karaoke girls on stage, a power black-out. During his diversion, the camera discovers fish and underground passages. (imdb)

Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth. (imdb)

The film follows a lower working class family of scalpers, a mother, father, son, daughter, and senile grandfather. The daughter gets in with the wrong crowd, a pimp, and tries to challenge her parents' authority by courting the pimp's advances. When a trip to the motel turns sexually aggressive she breaks a bottle and stabs him in the chest. The family is shattered that their daughter is embroiled in such an affair, so blind are they to their own delinquent behaviour serving as a bad role model (Donato Totaro)

Documentary about AIDS in Taiwan, based around the director's conversations with two HIV+ gay men, whose identities have to be kept a secret. (imdb)

A man blackmails a boy for his lunch money.

A woman is abandoned by her lover.

A monk walks all over the streets of Hong Kong. Very slowly.

Sleeping on Dark Waters could be called a 'Making of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. (SM)

The face of an exhausted man breathing deeply, his face agitated and, nearby, the sea. A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille - so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town's goings-on. (berlinale.de)

Tsai's "walker" returns, this time in Tokyo.

This is the festival trailer for Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival 2015. The trailer will be shown in over 100 cinemas in Austria and Germany and during the festival in several cinemas in Vienna. (imdb)

An alcoholic man and his two young children barely survive in Taipei. They cross path with a lonely grocery clerk who might help them make a better life. (imdb)

This disarmingly candid, insightful and ultimately very touching conversation between Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang and his muse Lee Kang-sheng illuminates one of the great actor-director collaborations in cinema history. (TIFF)

Walking on Water sees Tsai Ming-liang returning with the Walker series to his hometown of Kuching in Malaysia.

The Deserted, a film by Tsai, Ming-Liang. The artisan of cinematography approaches virtual reality, pushing the boundaries of VR film. A film produced by tech pioneer HTC Virtual Reality Content Centre, and co-produced with Jaunt China. The 55-minute long film's title in its original Chinese means "the Home of Lan Re Temple" and is a short ghost story stripped from a longer novel (imdb)

Radically rethinking the tired talking-heads template, Tsai Ming-liang's latest digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue. Comprised of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals (Tsai devotees will no doubt recognize his long-time muse, Lee Kang-sheng), the film shrewdly deemphasizes language while reducing context to a bare minimum. In their place, the beauty and imperfections of each face take center stage. (NYFF)

A construction worker's family cannot afford a house of their own, even though the head of the family builds houses. (Lee Daw-Ming)

Kang lives alone in a big house, Non in a small apartment in town. They meet, and then part, their days flowing on as before. (imdb)

Li-hsiang's Love Line/Lixiang de ganqing xian (1990) reveals a quiet story that follows the development of a love affair between an unmarried woman who is a factory worker, and the widowed factory manager.

Based on the true story of a boy with a rare medical condition whose foul-tasting medicine makes him reek of ammonia.

In 2019, the night in Hong Kong was still in fascinating beauty and the landscape of everyday life was gradually changing. Travelling the streets, Tsai Ming-liang documented the city's rhythm and ambience, along with an overpass. (imdb)

Continuing his Walker series, Tsai once again captures the slow walking Lee Kang-sheng with 16 long-shots at Taiwan's Zhuangwei Sand-Dune Visitor Service Park, as a part of the exhibition curated by Tsai. (imdb)

This short by Tsai Ming-liang, completed in 2021, was filmed at "the Dune" in Yilan, Taiwan, where the eight films in his Walker series were being shown. (imdb)

Zhongshan Hall was built in Taipei in 1936. It was designed by Ide Kaoru to serve as a public auditorium. It was here that the Japanese forces in Taiwan formally surrendered at the end of WWII in 1945, ending 51 years of Japanese occupation in Taiwan. Today, Zhongshan Hall is 83 years old. (MUBI.com)

A monk in red robe passes through rural and urban landscapes. His journey brings uncertainty when a stranger seems to follow his path. Lee Kang-Sheng stars in this Walker series film. (imdb)