The retrospective "Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien" will kick off on November 2 in Washington, D.C. This screening will be presented by the Freer Gallery of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the AFI Silver Theatre. (While the East Building of the National Gallery of Art is undergoing renovations, screenings will take place at the Goethe Institute in Chinatown.)
Hou Hsiao-hsien, the leading figure of the Taiwanese New Wave, is one of the most important and influential filmmakers to emerge over the past three decades. His sensuous, richly textured work, marked by elegantly staged long takes, largely static camera positions, and a radically elliptical approach to storytelling, is instantly recognizable in such widely acclaimed movies as Flowers of Shanghai, The Puppetmaster, Café Lumière, A City of Sadness, Dust in the Wind, and Flight of the Red Balloon. The retrospective “Also like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien” includes all of Hou’s seventeen feature films as director, all shown on film (including new 35mm prints).
This internationally touring retrospective is supported by the Taipei Cultural Center in New York and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and organized by Richard I. Suchenski (Director, Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College).
For more information on venues and schedules, please visit the presenters’ websites at http://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp,
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb.html, and http://www.afi.com/silver/.
