Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou Hsiao-hsien (born 8 April 1947) is a retired Mainland Chinese-born Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor.

He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement.

Hou Hsiao-hsien was born in Meixian District, Guangdong in 1947 to a Hakka family.

Later that same year, Hou's father took a job as Head Secretary for the Mayor of Taichung City.

The rest of the family joined him in Taiwan the following year and in 1949 he was made Supervisor of the Taipei Educational Bureau.

Hou was educated at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts.

Internationally, Hou is known for his austere and aesthetically rigorous dramas dealing with the upheavals of Taiwanese (and occasionally larger Chinese) history of the past century by viewing its impacts on individuals or small groups of characters.

Hou's consistent screenwriting collaborator since the mid-1980s has been the renowned author Chu T’ien-wen, a collaboration that began with the screenplay for Chen Kunhou's 1983 film, Growing Up.

Hou has also had some acting experience, appearing as the lead in fellow Taiwanese New Wave auteur Edward Yang's 1984 film Taipei Story.

He starred as Lung, a former minor league baseball star who is stuck operating an old-style fabric business, longing for his past days of glory.

Lung becomes alienated from his girlfriend and tries to find his way in Taipei.

Out of the 21 films he has directed, he has written or co-written 11 of those films in addition to writing or co-writing 10 other films directed by other filmmakers, including Taipei Story (1985) (Dir. Edward Yang), Heartbreak Island (1995) (Dir. Hsiao-ming Hsu) and My Favorite Season (1985) (Dir. Kun Hao Chen).

He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin (2015).

A City of Sadness (1989), for example, portrays a family caught in conflicts between the local Taiwanese and the newly arrived Chinese Nationalist government after World War II.

It was groundbreaking for broaching the long-taboo February 28 Incident and ensuing White Terror.

It became a major critical and commercial success, and garnered the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, making it the first Taiwanese film to win the top prize at the prestigious international film festival.

His storytelling is elliptical and his style marked by extreme long takes with minimal camera movement but intricate choreography of actors and space within the frame.

He uses extensive improvisation to arrive at the final shape of his scenes and the low-key, naturalistic acting of his performers.

His compositions are decentered, and links between shots do not adhere to an obvious temporal or causal narrative logic.

Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics by The Village Voice and Film Comment.

Without abandoning his famous austerity, his imagery has developed a sensual beauty during the 1990s, partly under the influence of his collaboration with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing.

Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics put together by The Village Voice and Film Comment.

He contributed two songs to the soundtrack of Dust of Angels, a film he produced.

Other highly regarded works of his include The Puppetmaster (1993) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998).

He has also cast revered puppeteer Li Tian-lu as an actor in several of his movies, most notably The Puppetmaster (1993), which is based on Li's life.

Hou's films have been awarded top prizes from prestigious international festivals such as the Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival and the Nantes Three Continents Festival.

Six of his films to date have been nominated for the Palme d'Or (best film award) at the Cannes Film Festival.

In a 1998 New York Film Festival worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema."

He directed the Japanese film Café Lumière (2003) for the Shochiku studio as an homage to Yasujirō Ozu; the film premiered at a festival commemorating the centenary of Ozu's birth.

The film deals with themes reminiscent of Ozu—tensions between parents and children and between tradition and modernity—in Hou's typically indirect manner.

His 2005 film Three Times features three stories of love set in 1911, 1966 and 2005 using the same actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen.

In August 2006, Hou embarked on his first Western project.

Filmed and financed entirely in France, Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) is the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student.

The film is the first part in a series of films sponsored by the Musée d'Orsay and stars Juliette Binoche.

In 2010, Hou directed the 3D short film for the Taipei Pavilion at the Expo 2010 Shanghai China.

A City of Sadness ranked 117th in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.

Hou also had a small role in the 2013 Chinese comedy-drama film Young Style, about a group of teenagers in high school.

In 2015, Hou won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Assassin (2015).

Prior to his retirement, Hou directed a total of 18 feature films, and three short film segments of omnibus films, which leads to a total of 21 films.

In 2017, Metacritic ranked Hsiao-hsien 16th on its list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century.