Programmed July 2025

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

With their hypnotic long takes and elliptical narrative structures, the dreamily enveloping films of Taiwanese cinema titan Hou Hsiao-hsien seem to reshape the rules of time, drifting languorously through the ever-changing sociopolitical realities of Taiwan past and present. Beginning his career with the charming, commercial romantic comedies Cute Girl and The Green, Green Grass of Home , he came into his own with his fourth feature, the poignant, more naturalistic coming-of-age drama The Boys from Fengkuei . With later triumphs like Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo —sublimely sensorial reflections on the passage of history at the end of the nineteenth and dawn of the twenty-first centuries, respectively—Hou firmly established himself as one of world cinema’s foremost masters, capable of rendering profound emotional states with the subtlest of strokes.

Still watchable end to end