The best Tsai Ming-liang’s movies
We present our ranking of the best Tsai Ming-liang’s movies. Do you love cinema? Or are you looking for a movie of your favorite actor to watch tonight? Surely you have some to see or that you did not know yet about Tsai Ming-liang.
Face
6/10
Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth.
The Story of Film: An Odyssey
8.4/10
The story of international cinema told through the history of cinematic innovation. Covering six continents and 12 decades, showing how film-makers are influenced both by the historical events of their times, and by each other.
Wiara
Six authorities of cinema describe their approach to transcendence, mysticism, spirituality and life after dead.
Your Face
7.1/10
Composed of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals, filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang's digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue.
Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema
6.9/10
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.
Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema
7/10
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.
Taipei 24H
6.2/10
Taipei 24H divides 24 hours in Taipei into 8 shorts. It opens with Cheng Fen-fen's upbeat and comedic "Share the Morning", and ends with Lee Kang-sheng running the final leg of this relay with "Remembrance" at 4am. Well-known director Tsai Ming-liang makes a rare appearance visiting a late night coffee shop. Taipei 24H is a contemporary urban chronicle of a city rarely at sleep.
My New Friends
7.2/10
Tsai interrupted his pre-production for The River to make this pioneering documentary for Taiwan's nascent AIDS-awareness campaign. Ignoring instructions to 'play down the gay angle', he centres the film on his own very candid conversations with two HIV+ young men. Sadly the identities of the interviewees have to be concealed, and so the freewheeling camerawork focuses most often on Tsai himself; but the sense of rapport between the director and his 'new friends' is palpable and very moving, even to Western viewers already only too familiar with these issues.
Our Time, Our Story
7.2/10
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.
Afternoon
7.1/10
Lush jungle and a building in ruins are the ideal stage for a film-confession that defies storytelling and goes beyond conversation on cinema. Tsai Ming-Liang and his actor Lee Kang-sheng confess and put on stage a pièce in which attention and slowness are in tune with the rhythm of memory. The unveiling of Tsai Ming-liang’s filmmaking: from Stray Dogs to the most intimate notes of the director-actor relationship.
Looking for Tsai
4.4/10
Human shortcomings in the pursuit of an idol. Two film school students travel to interview Taiwanese film director Tsai Ming-liang and actor Lee Kang-sheng in Oslo.
Moonlight in the River
Tsai Ming-liang designed this short film as a farewell to his friend Simon Field, who was about to leave his position as director of the Rotterdam Festival after eight years in office. The piece follows two dogs roaming the Tamshui River in Taipei, accompanied by the director's voice-over as he reads a written dedication for Field.
