On a dark and rainy night, a historic and regal Taipei cinema sees its final film: 1967 martial arts feature "Dragon Inn". As the film plays, the lives of the theater's various employees and patrons intersect, and two ghostly actors arrive to mourn the passing of an era.
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 street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.
An alcoholic man and his two young children barely survive in Taipei. They cross paths with a lonely grocery clerk who might help them make a better life.
Rawang, an immigrant from Bangladesh living in awful conditions, takes pity on a Chinese man, Hsiao-kang, who is beaten up and left in the street. Rawang lovingly nurses him on a mattress he found. When he is almost healed, Hsiao-kang meets the waitress Chyi. His love for Rawang is put to the test.
Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth.
A young woman wandering around meets a young man going to a casting call for a pornographic film.
In 2015, Tsai Ming-Liang was once again invited by the Hong Kong International Film Festival to make the opening short film. This time, he selected Shibuya station in Tokyo as his main filming location and invited the famous Japanese actor Masanobu Ando to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng. They sleep separately at a capsule hotel and cleanse themselves at a public bath. Their fatigued bodies yearn for sleep but restless minds keep them for falling asleep. "No No Sleep" won the Best Director Award at the Taipei Film Festival.
Having lost all his money in the stock market, a depressed man falls in love with a woman over a suicide helpline.
A metaphor for mourning as much as it is a reminder to slow down, Tsai Ming-liang's stunningly beautiful Walker features his acteur fétiche Lee Kang-Sheng as a red-robed monk barely locomoting through the bustling streets of Hong Kong.
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.
The walker with the shaved head and dressed in a red robe is barefoot. He walks slowly but determinedly through the forest, over stones and grassland. He also makes his way through the shadows of trees and houses. He sets foot in the train station, the church and the museum. The sun rises and sets again. The walker passes through Washington, D.C. Another stranger is also on the move in the city. We are unsure whether or not he is following the walker.
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.
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.
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.
Free interpretation of the myth. Tsai Ming-liang propels a woman neglected by her lover in the mob of the bus station of Kuala Lumpur.
Six filmmakers present six short films about the experiences of Chinese immigrants. Shot across Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Myanmar, the anthology depicts the crisis of identity that accompanies international migration.
In 2013, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited by Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui to make a short film for an anthology film, "Letters from the South". Tsai Ming-Liang returned to his hometown in Kuching, Malaysia and made a "Walker" film at his childhood home, "Walking on Water". The seven-storey flat which contained the happy memories of his childhood is now occupied by strangers. His old neighbour, an older girl who used to bathe and feed him when he was a child, has also grown old.
Drama about a young boy who suffers from a rare deficiency disease. The medicine he has to take every day has the side effect of making him reek of ammonia. The consequent bullying and ostracism by schoolmates exacerbates the boy's sense of victimhood. His mother, meanwhile, runs a help-line for parents with comparable problems.
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.
