Three stories taking place at three different moments, dedicated to the time of love, of freedom and of youth, respectively. 1966: a young man meets a waitress in a billiard room shortly before he leaves to do his military service. But when he returns to see her again he learns the girl has moved. 1911: a rich man wants to redeem a courtesan’s contract and steps in to hasten up the process after his son gets the girl pregnant. 2005: a singer who is going blind and a photographer who lives with his girlfriend fall in love in chaotic Taipei. “Our lives are full of fragments of fairly unimportant memories, which we don’t know how to name or classify. But they remain in our minds, they are impossible to cancel. I’m almost 60 years old now and I have had those memories for so long that they are a part of me. I think they are the best moments of my life: not because I can’t forget them or because they are gone for good, but because they only exist in my memory. Maybe the only way to come to terms with them was to film them.” (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Biography
film director
Hou Hsiao Hsien
Hou
Hsiao-hsien (China 1947)
graduated from the
Academy of Fine
Arts in 1972 and became
one of the leaders of Taiwan's new cinema with his films The Boys from
Fengkuei (1983) and A
Summer at Grandpa's (1984). City of
Sadness won the Leone d'Oro at Venice
in 1989. He then made a trilogy
about the history of Taiwan: The Puppetmaster (1993),
which won the
Jury's Prize at Cannes; Good Men, Good Women (1995)
and Flowers of
Shanghai (1999). In 2001 his film Millennium Mambo
also received the
Jury's Prize at Cannes.
FILMOGRAFIA
Jiushi liuliu
de ta (Cute
Girl, 1980), Feng er
ti ta cai (Blind of Love, 1981), Zai
na hepan qingcao qing (The
Green, Green Grass of Home, 1983), Fenggui lai de
ren (I ragazzi
di Feng Kuei, 1983), Erzi de Dawan'ou (The
Sandwich Man,
1983), Dongdong de jiaqi (In vacanza dal nonno,
1984), Tong nian wang
shi (Tempo di vivere, tempo di morire 1985),
Lianlian Fengchen (Dust
in the Wind, 1986), Nilouhe Nuer (La
figlia del Nilo, 1987), Beqing
chengshi (Città dolente,
1989), Hsimeng Rensheng (Il maestro
burattinaio, 1993), Hao nan, hao nü (Good
Men, Good Women,
1995), Nanguo zaijan, nanguo (Goodbye
South, Goodbye, 1996), Hai
shang hua (Flowers of
Shanghai,
1998), Qianxi Mambo (Millennium Mambo,
2001), Kôhî jikô (Cafè
Lumière, 2003), Zui hao de shi guang
(Three Times, 2005).