Search a film or person :

Hou Hsiao-hsien is a Actor, Director, Scriptwriter and Producer Taiwanais born on 8 april 1947

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Infos
Photos
Best films
Family
Characters
Awards

If you like this person, let us know!

Do you like this person ?

I like

I don't like

Birth name Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢)
Nationality Taiwan
Birth 8 april 1947 (77 years)

Hou Hsiao-hsien (born 8 April 1947) is a Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer, singer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. 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).

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. In a 1998 worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema." In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, fourteen critics and two directors named A City of Sadness (1989) one of the ten greatest films ever made, placing it at #117 in the overall critics' poll.

Biography

A Hakka, Hou Hsiao-Hsien was born in Mei County, Guangdong province (China) in 1947. He and his family fled the Chinese Civil War to Taiwan the following year. 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. 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. 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-Bin. Hou's consistent screenwriting collaborator since the mid-1980s has been the renowned author Chu Tien-Wen, a collaboration that began with the screenplay for Chen Kunhou's 1983 film, Growing Up. 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. 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 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. In 2005 his film Three Times - which 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 Musee d'Orsay and stars Juliette Binoche. In 2010, Hou directed the 3D short film for Taipei Pavilion in Expo 2010 Shanghai China.

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

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

Hou is also a singer, having contributed two songs to the 1992 soundtrack of Dust of Angels, a movie he also produced.