Nantes Three Continents Festival (International reception)

Held annually in Nantes since 1979, it exclusively focuses on films from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Golden Mongolfiere is the top award, and has been won by films from Iran, Taiwan and China.

History:
Founded by brothers Alain and Philippe Jalladeau. They felt cinema, at the end of the 1970s, needed a move away from overly politicised films and the cult of semiotics, in order to return to cinema as an art, personal and auteur-based. Furthermore they felt too many directors and films from the 'South' faded too soon out of the circuit (of festivals and cineclubs) and became forgotten. Although a few such auteurs were championed (they site the example of Pierre Rissient championing Lino Brocka), they rarely managed to be seen in Europe, their visibility was restricted and their distribution quasi-non-existent.
The Jalladeau brothers first met Brazilian filmmakers (of the Cinema Novo) movement, in 1969 at the Venice Film Festival, and then in 1972 at the Berlin Forum, and got to know them (thereby striking up some of the initial connections that would go into their founding the festival??).
The Jalladeaus speak of Cannes' failings, e.g. towards Satyajit Ray whose Charulata was rejected there, or towards the Brazilian Bye Bye Brazil (Carlos Diegues, 1979), screened at the same time as Apocalypse Now and thus seen by only a handful of people --- the Jalladeaus also mention attending a screening of Ray's The Chess Players where again the audience consisted of only a tiny group of people. These filmmakers from the 'South' were being shunned for US and European films mostly, and needed a festival which would appreciate them, respect them and reappraise them more fully.

"En 1978, nous fûmes invités au Festival de Carthage en Tunisie. Sa thématique consacrée à l’Afrique et au Monde arabe s’était ouvert cette année-là à l’Asie et à l’Amérique latine. Nous pûmes rencontrer les cinéastes arabes et africains bien sûr mais aussi vénézuéliens, colombiens, sri lankais – mais le Festival était malheureusement débordé par les débats politiques qui agitaient le Monde arabe et le cinéma était souvent oublié. Il n’y eut pas de suite à cette expérience tricontinentale." [In 1978 we were invited to the Carthage Festival in Tunisia. Its theme usually dedicated to Africa and the Arab world was opened up that year to Asia and Latin America too. We of course could meet Arab and African filmmakers, but also Venezuelans, Colombians, Sri Lankans... Sadly however the festival was overshadowed by political debates stirring in the Arab world and cinema was often forgotten. There was no follow-up to this tri-continental experiment.]

This inspired the brothers to set up in 1979 the Three Continents Festival (its name inspired by that of Festival dei due mondi, an Italian music and theatre festival set up for the two worlds, old Europe and new America, exactly what Nantes would wish to set its exploration away from), with help from the Nantes town hall/administration. The aims included the hope of creating some international recognition for unknown filmmakers working outside Europe and the USA, to promote the notion of a universal cinematic language and hence that only cinematic merit and not political would be the criterion for the films, and to offer a platform for filmmakers to represent their cultures in all its diversity while being treated fairly and respectfully, not as if some 'third-class' guest.

The first edition in 1979 was marked by cinema by African-American filmmakers such as Melvin van Peebles and Charles Burnett. From 1980 on, the Jalladeaus (and presumably other members of their festival 'team'?) travelled to both find potential new films/directors, with what they admit was an cahiers du cinema style auteurist bias (i.e. less focus on producers and the workings local economy and industry). They went to India where they met Satyajit Ray and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and discovered the films of Ritwik Ghatak, and hence the focus of the festival that year was on India. In 1981, and through Pierre Rissient, they met Lino Brocka and discovered the lack of any archival system in the Philippines where films were simply not conserved. With the help of Brocka's archives and some more searching, a retrospective dedicated to Filipino cinema resulted in the 1981 edition. This programme also helped to contribute to the foundation of a first cinematheque in the Philippines and the birth of an awareness of the need for film preservation there.

"1988 fut une année importante pour le Festival. Il acquit définitivement cette année-là la réputation de « découvreur » auprès des professionnels occidentaux. Nous avions sélectionné en compétition un film iranien de Bayram Beyzai. Un peu plus tard, nous reçûmes pour visionnement un autre film intitulé Où est la maison de mon ami ? Le titre n’était pas vraiment stimulant mais ce film était réalisé par Abbas Kiarostami. Cinéaste inconnu en Occident, il jouissait en Iran d’une bonne réputation – il avait débuté avant la Révolution avec un joli film : Le Passager. Ce film nous avait fait une très forte impression mais ne voulant pas à l’époque mettre deux films d’un même pays en Compétition, il fut sélectionné Hors Compétition. David Streiff, alors directeur du Festival de Locarno, présent à Nantes, sélectionna immédiatement le film pour son festival. Kiarostami était lançé internationalement. Il ne vint jamais à Nantes avec un autre film, mais devint notre ami et nous offrit en sa présence une belle exposition photographique en 2005."

"...les professionnels du monde entier venaient dans l’espoir de découvrir des perles rares et de nouveaux auteurs. Les acheteurs et distributeurs européens voulaient encore plus de films qu’ils ne voyaient pas ailleurs. Devions-nous faire un marché du film ? Du moins une plus large programmation ? Nous n’en avions pas les moyens financiers et Nantes ne possédait pas les infrastructures adaptées à un tel projet.
Aujourd’hui, en 2008, sans doute les romantiques aventures cinématographiques associées aux découvertes des territoires inconnus seront moins nombreuses car la mondialisation fait voyager les films et les personnes. L’information circule en tous sens, l’émotion et le désir diminuent, puisque tout semble à portée de main. Mais le cinéma est toujours vivant et continue de bouger, y compris et surtout dans les 3 continents. Même si nous ne savons pas encore ce qu’il nous réserve demain, la saga des 3 continents n’est pas terminée et une nouvelle page s’écrira dès le 30e festival. À l’heure du bilan, on peut penser que nous aurions pu faire un « petit grand festival », mais parce que nous avons avant tout aimé les films, été animés par une curiosité sans cesse renouvelée, été soutenus depuis le premier Festival par quelques collaborateurs dévoués partageant notre passion, peut-être avons-nous au moins réussi à créer un « grand petit festival » qui bénéficie toujours aujourd’hui d’une telle reconnaissance à travers le monde..."

Initially the festival's selection policy ruled that no film previously shown somewhere else could be screened, but later in the 80s this was changed and reduced to only films previously shown in French film festivals.


1984
The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien) shared top prize with Nacer Khemir's Wanderers of the Desert.


1985
The Runner (Amir Naderi) and A Summer at Grandpa's (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) shared top prize, while Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige) won a prize for cinematography.





References:
http://www.3continents.com/fr
http://www.3continents.com/wp-content/uploads/f3c-repertoire2.pdf (Archival film catalogue)

A Brighter Summer Day (Film)

1991. Dir: Edward Yang.

Context:

By 1991 the bottom had dropped out of the local market. Taiwan-made productions fell precipitously, numbering just forty-seven pictures, with audiences abandoning local films in favor of Hong Kong fare.

The huge success of Hou’s City of Sadness two years before, breaking box office records and enjoying festival acclaim, was a poignant memory accompanying a period of waiting and uncertainty. For Yang’s audience, the waiting was longer yet, since it had been five years since the acclaimed The Terrorizers. Many wondered what was next for Taiwan New Cinema and whether the momentum of City of Sadness, particularly its role in the post–martial law period of liberalization, could be sustained.

The Film:
The film’s basic premise is to superimpose school rituals—what passed for secondary education in Taipei, ca. 1960—onto the larger political repressions of the White Terror period. While it is tempting to call this allegory, it would be wrong because it implies the Guling street youth murder is just a device. But it is more than that. A better descriptive term would be telescoping—a large magnification of educational pressure and regimentation so that it expands, parallels, and occupies the screen of state-controlled regimes under martial law. Schoolyard politics are a microcosm; they authorize and stand in for a militarized, authoritarian civil society. Like a very slow zoom out, Yang gradually reveals what is happening in the larger world.

Tunnel vision is a characteristic figure of style in A Brighter Summer Day, composed of a long shot through arches, doorways, windows, and various other frames, promoting active exploration of a deep space. Recessional lines and staggered planes work like visual magnets, pulling the eye to “hot” places in the shot. In tunnel vision, darkness often surrounds and frames the space. Depth is enhanced through pools of light and shadow, which sometimes confuse priorities of distance.



Reception:
In the main, Yang’s new film did not disappoint Taiwan’s critics and, like City, it attracted prominent commentary by public figures who saw the importance of New Cinema’s historical articulation of contemporary cultural politics.

Showing for three weeks in Taipei, BSD grossed a respectable $9.93 million. It also won a special jury prize at the 1991 Tokyo International Film Festival, though the festival tried to make it look like something other than a Taiwan film. Because a government-backed Japanese conglomerate, Mico, had put up money for international rights even before Yang started shooting, the film was entered as Japanese.


References:
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?id=1129
Taiwan, a Treasure Island, 102-103,

A Confucian Confusion (Film)

1994. Dir: Edward Yang.

Mahjong (Film)

1996. Dir: Edward Yang.

The Terroriser (Film)

Kongbu fenzi  aka The Terrorizers. 1986. Dir: Edward Yang. Scr: Yang, Xiao Ye.


Context:
Bears some resemblance to various art-works of Western Modernisn, both literary (e.g. André Gide's The Counterfeiters, even perhaps in Yang's choice of English title) and cinematic (Antonioni's Blow-Up), showcasing how Yang's work stands apart from more nativist Taiwanese/Chinese films: he assimilates Western influences more directly. Here it is useful to remember Jameson's point that in 'Third World' countries, modernity and post-modernity both arrived almost simultaneously (and late), from external sources.

"After this film, the New Cinema as a collective began to dissolve quickly. Evidence of the dissolution was a manifesto issued in 1987 by more than fifty film workers (including Yang himself) demanding more support from the government, producers, and distributors. In retrospect, The Terrorizers is the twilight of the New Cinema; it was also the last film Yang made in the commercial sector. After that, he became a true independent, sourcing talent and technicians through his own local network, and that of his executive producer Yu Weiyan"


The Film:
The film is very playful with notions of the interlinking between art and life, and with modernist concepts (life imitates art), perhaps drawing comparison to some of Kiarostami's characteristics (although he does these same things in a very different way, with very different concerns, and is probably less 'showy').


Different media all play a part in the film, as if themselves competing with the medium of film: photography, television, literature and even one could say the telephone all play major roles.
Yang described it as being about the everyday emotional 'ticking bombs' we set off in each other.

Fredric Jameson argues its intersecting narrative constructs a peculiarly urban context epitomizing postmodern space, a series of boxlike packages that contain, separate, and isolate inhabitants. (Note loose but interesting connection to later films, e.g. Haneke's Code Unknown.)

"The pleasure of the film comes in recognizing the intersections between different subplots, relationships, and genres. Negotiating the links between them makes the film an engrossing, satisfying experience, like the Sunday crossword"

Fukan: Fukan (literary supplements) are a unique Chinese journalistic tradition. The wife gives up her regular job to devote herself full-time to writing stories for the fukan fiction contest. No locally informed contemporary viewer of the film could possibly miss the subtle sarcasm directed at the dominant role played by the fukan institution in Taiwan's cultural life in the 1970s and 1980s. [Island on the Edge, 17]

Reception:
The film was, to Yang's surprise, a box-office hit.

"The Terrorizer's modernistic theme inevitably invoked a sense of deja vu among Western critics, well-represented by Fredric Jameson, who applies phrases like 'now-archaic modernity', 'old-fashioned reflexivity' and 'residual modernism' to the film" [Island on the Edge, 16]

Peggy Chiao lauded the film as the first Taiwan film to explore the nature of film or film-making. Zhan Hongzhi praised Yang's use of 'international film language'. "In short these local critics essentially concurred with Jameson in seeing The Terrorizer as a product of 'belated' or 'derivative' modernism, a view that finds justification in a Eurocentric genealogy of 'modernism'."  [Island on the Edge, 16]

"Unless you are a regular habitué of the NFT or a particularly assiduous patron of the London Film Festival, you could easily be forgiven for never having heard of Taiwan's New Wave" [Derek Elley, Films and Filming, Feb 1989... also reference to Blow-Up]



References:
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?id=1177 
Jameson in New Chinese Cinemas, 117-.

Yi Yi (Film)

2000. Dir: Edward Yang.









The Film:
"It portrays an extended family and their neighbours, friends and business partners in a 'world of jet travel, bullet trains and instant electronic transfer of money, image and information'. Yi Yi displays Yang's characteristic visual style - long takes and wide shots depicting characters in their socio-spatial context. For example, when NJ's ex-girlfriend weeps alone in her Tokyo hotel room, the scene is entirely shot in one take, in reflection, looking out of the window into a densely built-up metropolitan night sky. Throughout the film, glass reflections convey the permeability of space - space without borders appropriate to the age of transnational capitalism. The characters' identities, relationships and affective states fuse with the cartography of global cities, teeming with anonymous transnational spaces, ambivalent signifiers of aspiration and alienation."




Reception:
Won Best Director Prize at Cannes 2000.


References:
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?id=1185
Essay in Chinese Films in Focus.

That Day, on the Beach (Film)

1983. Dir: Edward Yang.

Taipei Story (Film)

1985. Dir: Edward Yang.


Context:



The Film:
The ending: In many respects, Along is as violent as his younger eventual killer. Unlike the boy, however, he has the illusion that he is fighting for his honor, an honor so difficult to define that it has become idiosyncratic. As Along explains to Azhen (after his fight with her yuppie friend in the bar), he believes that fighting is for a kind of “spirit” (yiko qi) or a “sense of righteousness” (zhengyi gan). When the teenager stalks Azhen, Along beats him mercilessly after lecturing him. The boy does not seem to deserve such a punishment; moreover, Along’s attachment to his girlfriend is not strong enough to justify such a jealous outburst. To this extent, Along’s violence is not so different from his killer’s, despite his own belief in a justifiable cause. The boy, however, responds by attacking him with a knife from behind, instead of fighting with Along face to face as required by the traditional code of honor and its face-saving ethics. Then he flees on his motorcycle and leaves Along bleeding to death on a street corner amid a pile of garbage, including an old television set. In the deserted Taipei street, mortally wounded by a dishonorable act, Along is completely abandoned by the world. His final futile attempt to wave for a taxi is ignored by the driver, who is probably afraid of getting himself in trouble with a wounded passenger. Ironically, Along finally finds his place among garbage, piled up with all kinds of useless articles that have already been consumed by the city. Like the TV set and other city trash wrapped in plastic bags, he is the useless leftover of another age.

On the empty screen of the abandoned TV, Along hallucinates watching the news of his baseball team’s victory approximately twenty years ago. On their return from their world championship, Along and his teammates are called the darlings and sweethearts of Taiwan, the glory of China’s sons and daughters. Along laughs bitterly at this fantasized announcement. As Aqing had commented earlier, pretty clothes are more important than excellent skills for the current junior baseball team in Taipei, because appearance is more significant than substance in contemporary society. The pursuit of national glory becomes meaningless in a commercialized modern city. His very honor also belongs to this trash heap, forsaken in the heart of the modern city.

In the following shot, the camera cuts to Azhen, who casually sleeps on a chair in her apartment. Her former boss, Ms. Mei, phones and offers her a job, and the two meet in a newly constructed office building. The huge, empty, and faintly lighted hall, where the only distinctive sound is Azhen’s high-heel shoes knocking at the floor, echoes the beginning scene of her visit to the new apartment with Along. The only difference is that her partner is no longer a man, her childhood sweetheart, but a woman, her boss and business mentor. Not only in terms of gender but also in many other aspects, Ms. Mei is just the opposite of Along. As in the past she again demonstrates her ability to remain on top of the modern world by moving a branch of an American high-tech company to Taiwan when information technology is on the verge of becoming the leader in the world economy. [Lu Tonglin]

"Taipei Story also manifests a complex awareness of the tensions that shadow and inform contemporary urban living. This film explores the troubled dislocations of the contemporary moment..." ['NCC', K-kT & WD, p64]
"The result is a film that captures the flow of urban life, reflecting the director's characteristic energy of perception and gift for precise imagery, producing a kind of poetry of urban banality. [The film] is redolent of the work of antonioni, such as L'eclisse" [Id. p64-65]


Reception:
Won Critic's Prize at Locarno 1985.




References:
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?id=1168
Lu Tonglin, chapter on Yang.

In Our Time (Film)

1982. Dirs: Edward Yang, Chang-Yi, Ko I-Chen, Tao Te-Chen.












References:
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?id=1150

Edward Yang (Director)

(Yang Dechang). Born: 1947, Shanghai. Died: 2007, Los Angeles.

His family was originally from Guangdong province and relocated to Taiwan (like many others) in 1949. He graduated in engineering in Taiwan in 1969, before getting an MA degree in computer science in 1972 from the University of Florida. In 1974, he briefly enrolled to study film at the University of Southern California, but quit after a year. He worked in the computer industry in the US for the next few years, before returning to Taiwan in 1981. There he would initially get his break (in a very young under-productive film industry in the process of re-inventing itself) first directing a TV show episode and then a segment in an omnibus film, In Our Time.

"He was a self-taught filmmaker, an engineer-cum-comic book
illustrator, not a director with an orthodox training in the craft. He is a cinephile,
with impeccable taste in European and American cinema. Inspired by the example
of Werner Herzog, who used the money earned as a blacksmith to hand-make his
own early features, Yang embarked on the same road. But his commitment to
film is part of a wide-ranging aesthetic sensibility that is more mathematical than
expressive. Yang idolizes architects (I. M. Pei), musicians (Beethoven, Bob Dylan),
and scientists (Einstein), not only artists and filmmakers." [Taiwan Treasure Island, 92.]

Had an antagonistic relationship with the domestic Taiwanese film industry, and many of his films, especially all his later ones, were never released domestically [find out more on this].

Yang in fact had trouble negotiating the commercial practices of Taiwan’s film industry from the beginning. From his first feature That Day, on the Beach, he found it hard to work with the crew assigned him by Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), and this drove him away from commercial production.

"From virgin to vamp, from innocence to experience, Yang’s women are emblems for socioeconomic transformations, the exchange of qing for economic gain and rapid replacement of old with new. The intertwined stories of two women in That Day, on the Beach masks the consequences of the economic boom in postwar Taiwan—selling out qing for money. Yang uses the two women to suggest that women are adaptable, and men are more vulnerable, to change. Men appear to be socioeconomic achievers, but they are the ones to bear the costs of competitive pressure.... The women in Yang’s films cast about for a suitable feminine role to play, often wracked by indecision. Their angst and neurosis is nothing, though, next to the profound identity crises of males, particularly those negotiating rites of manhood." [Taiwan Treasure Island, 123-4]

"Missing persons are a common thread in all Yang’s films, and their absence is connected to a loss of capital and confidence, both financial and emotional (qing). Yang’s narratives are all based on the resolution of a puzzle. Each story begins with a misplaced piece, nearly always taking the form of the missing. That Day, on the Beach opens with the search for the disappeared husband; the vanishing Ms. Mei in Taipei Story uncovers the deficits of the major characters Chin and Ah-Lon. Nobody actually goes missing in The Terrorizers, but the whole film is based on deferral, displacement, and waiting. Honey is the missing person in A Brighter Summer Day, hiding somewhere in the South. During his absence, struggles for power and women break out in the gangs of Guling Street. But when he returns, he is murdered instead of restoring order. In Mahjong, a kidnapping is used to locate the missing father of Redfish, who returns, only to kill himself and his mistress. Similarly, the grandmother in Yi Yi returns to life after her long coma, then dies, bringing the family together again." 

Themes & Motifs:

• .
• Absent/weak fathers (also seen in Hou, and related perhaps to the 'fraudulent' father-figure of the nation, Chiang Kai-Shek.

Filmography

• In Our Time (1982, joint-director)
• That Day, on the Beach (1983)
• Taipei Story (1985)
• The Terroriser (1986)
• A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
• A Confucian Confusion (1994)
• Mahjong (1996)
• Yi Yi (2000)

References:
Jameson in New Chinese Cinemas, 117-. 
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 199.  

Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Director)

Born 1947, Meizhou (Guangdong Province), China.

His family, who were of the Hakka ethnicity, moved to Taiwan in 1949, settling near Kaohsiung. After graduating in 1972 from the film department of the Taiwan National Academy of Arts, (he worked for a while as calculator salesman and then...) he entered the film industry the following year, initially working as production assistant and assistant for several established directors. He also wrote scripts during this time. His early film Green Green Grass of Home (1982) established much of his concerns and traits: it had a rural setting and children protagonists, much like most of his 1980s output.

Entry into the film industry:
Hou entered the industry in 1972 as the apprentice of Lai Chengying, a longtime cinematographer for Li Xing. “Lai san” (Japanese meaning “Mr. Lai,” as Hou respectfully addressed his master) was a prolific cinematographer in the 1960s and ’70s. Lai was responsible for the photography of many Taiwan classics, including the 1965 healthy realist Beautiful Duckling and a number of famous Qiong Yao romantic melodramas. Hou was brought in to work as a continuity keeper on Li Xing’s 1973 romantic melodrama, Heart with a Million Knots (Xin you qianqian jie), a Hong Kong and Taiwan coproduction meant to cash in on the huge success of Li’s earlier hits. As an apprentice to the film industry, Hou’s major task in his formative period was to learn various genre conventions in order to assist his teachers and seniors. In 1975, Hou was promoted to assistant director and followed his teacher Lai Chengying to Young Sun (Yongsheng), a distribution and producing company. Hou continued to work as Lai’s assistant director and scriptwriter. It was during this period that Hou established a collaborative relationship with Chen Kunhou, Lai’s nephew and Young Sun’s in-house cinematographer. In the next five years, Hou worked on ten films directed by Lai and collaborated with Chen on several romantic comedies.

Also met Liao Ching-sung during those years, who would edit his every feature to the present day. Interview with Liao with Suchenski in his book, reveals a lot about influence of Chinese poetry, and Taoist thought, on the editing and transitions of Hou's films.

Then he was given an opportunity to direct and write, with Chen Kunhou as cinematographer, three films in the following two years. The first two films, Cute Girl (aka Lovable You, Jiushi liu liu de ta, 1980) and Cheerful Wind (aka Play While You Play, Feng’er ti ta cai, 1981), are somewhat like “package films” in terms of making them as double bills based on one premise. Cute Girl and Cheerful Wind share identical casting; their stories are comparable; their narrative structure and visual-audio style and even comic gags are almost indistinguishable. Both films cast Canto pop singer Kenny Bee (Zhong Zhentao) and Taiwan pop icon Feng Feifei. The surplus value of casting pop idols is to fill the soundtrack with many popular songs by the two leads. This was a standard practice in romantic melodrama in the 1970s, a symbiotic, cross-media cooperation between the recording and film industries. Pop singers plus comic features granted Hou a hot ticket to the rather closed film distribution network. These two films were released for consecutive Chinese New Year holidays, traditionally the most profitable period of the year for the movie business. With these two films, Hou was able to establish himself as an A-list commercial director.

Cute Girl (1980): Hou’s first feature exemplifies seizure of opportunities for renewal, as well as maintaining continuity with a popular tradition. Youth subject matter, family ethics, the Taiwanese countryside, popular music, and low humor commingle in an appealing mixture of romance and comedy. Hou capitalizes on the “Taiwanese” quality of Feng Feifei, a Taiwan girl popular with Taiwan natives through her songs and television work. Using popular music and television, Hou took previous forms in a new direction away from the sentimental, literary quality of the film melodramas of the 1970s. Audiences appreciated the new emphasis, at once lighter and more topical. Cute Girl may seem a long way from Hou’s mature works. However, two themes reappear later in different forms. They are the contrast between competitive city and communal countryside, and an important aspect of the modern Taiwanese family, namely, that a seemingly rigid kinship can actually be malleable, with some ingenuity, sincerity, and good humour.

Cheerful Wind (1981): Hou’s second film, with the same two stars, is a clever romantic comedy released for the Lunar New Year. Like Cute Girl, its charm is so effortless that the artfulness is easily overlooked. If it seems like commercial fluff, Cheerful Wind has much unexpected richness. The opening scenes that take place on the P’eng-hu Islands (Pescadores) take great liberties with generic and thematic expectations. (Note the fiction within fiction beginning where it is only revealed after a while that the kids trying to set off a firecracker are in fact acting for a washing powder commercial, when the camera moves to reveal the film crew.) When the story moves to Taipei after the first thirty minutes, it settles into a more conventional moralistic musical comedy. The structure is a reverse of Cute Girl in that it begins in the rural setting and then moves to Taipei in the middle section. But in both films Hou already gives the impression of being more interested in filming the rural locations, the specific tempo of that setting, the mischievous kids, the trees, etc. Movement and distance also emerge as themes in both these films. Overall though, it is perhaps more useful to see these films as part of the continuing learning curve of Hou, as an empirical filmmaker rather than a theoretical one, who learnt on the job, making the most of his increasing industry experience and natural instinct to solve whatever problems were encountered.
Both films are in widescreen, with frequent zooms and pop songs to show off their stars' talents.

In 1982, Hou directed The Green, Green Grass of Home, the film believed to have been a spark for the commercial director to defect to art cinema in the approaching New Cinema movement.

"It was while working with a child actor during the production of The Green, Green Grass of Home (1983) that he first allowed his actors to improvise their dialogue, a practice he continues today. This method has enabled Hou to coax more naturalistic performances out of professional and nonprofessionals alike, and it has subsequently had far-reaching effects on Hou's filmmaking as a whole, demanding longer takes to allow for cohesion in the actors' work. And it is this practice, among others, that aligned Hou's style (however inadvertently) with a kind of international neorealist movement and defined it in opposition to his commercial contemporaries in the moribund, constrictive Taiwanese film industry of the early and mid-1980s"

In 1983 he collaborated on the omnibus film The Sandwich Man, where his segment is typically considered the most impressive (just like Edward Yang's in In Our Time made one year before).

"His "country" films do not simply evoke bucolic nostalgia; they are about the intersection of the rural and the urban (or the past and the future) in modern Taiwanese life. In both The Boys from Fengkuei and A Summer at Grandpa's, the dichotomies of past/future or of country/city are not quite opposed or contentious, rather they are in dialogue, and this dialogue is part of a broader debate about Taiwan's modernization"

In 1988, he was voted by World Critics at the New York Film Festival as one of three directors likely to shape the future of cinema in the decades to come.


Literary influences: The influence of Shen Congwen, the famous 20th century mainland Chinese writer (recommended to him in the early 1980s by Chu Tien-wen, see quote below), had some impact in his incorporating the concept of 'distance', 'objectivity' and observing/relating his story and characters with some form of dispassion. The long take/long-shot aesthetic may partly have stemmed from the artistic breakthrough Hou achieved in discovering Shen Congwen.
His films are sometimes regarded as a cinematic equivalent of the literary 'roots literature' movement which expressed a nativist Taiwanese sentiment and addressed issues of Taiwanese cultural identity.

Style:

• Long-take long-shot aesthetic. Often static camera but not always. Preference for flat frontal shots as opposed to angled ones.
• When The Puppetmaster competed at the 1994 Cannes festival, Hou came out openly about his propensity for Eastern / Oriental aesthetics, particularly in his use of liubai as a key narrative strategy in The Puppetmaster. Liubai, leaving space blank, is a common compositional device in traditional Chinese ink painting to prompt emotional contemplation. In cinema, liubai entails inviting audiences into a cinematic space, not to understand, connecting cause and effect, but to experience: in other words, an aesthetic of deliberation. Thus, spatiality is emphasized to privilege aura, ambiance, and mood, leaving temporal markers as mere footnotes. Ellipses, elimination of a significant portion of plot, are likened to the traditional compositional principle in which a small section is believed to be more revealing than a totality.
• "Before making Fengkuei my ideas about cinema were rather simple: narrative, to tell the story in the script. Later on I met some filmmakers who had returned to Taiwan from abroad. They had a lot of theories about cinema, which got me all confused. I was puzzled; the script was ready but I didn’t know how to give it form. After listening to me, my scriptwriter Zhu Tianwen showed me a book called Autobiography of Shen Congwen. After reading the book I discovered Shen’s point of view was somewhat like looking down from above. Like natural laws, it has no joy and no sorrow. That I found to be very close to me. It doesn’t matter if he’s describing a brutal military crackdown or various kinds of death; life to him is a river, which flows and flows but is without sorrow or joy. The result is a certain breadth of mind, or a certain perspective that is very moving. Because of this, it produces a generosity of viewpoint. I decided to adopt this angle. The problem was how to transplant it to film. I didn’t really have a solution but I discovered a simple device, and that was to constantly tell the cinematographer to “keep a distance, and be cooler.” It allowed certain real situations to naturally unfold themselves. The camera just stayed at a distance and quietly watched over them." [p158, Taiwan Treasure Island]
• Hou's films/scenes have been described as always 'in media res', present-tense, always in the present moment (hence comparisons with Pialat by French critics) and his rendering of time/the present as something perpetually vanishing (one writer described his style as 'writing in water'). His style prioritises unmitigated experience of the moment over narrative development (he prefers filming/showing over storytelling/plot-development, which however belies the careful structure of his screenplays), which is part of his attitude to dealing with time in his films. (Also the way he deals with history, macro-history happening in the background of micro-history, the characters he focuses on are living in the moment, e.g. the family in A City of Sadness, without always being aware of the greater historical narrative they are caught in, which is only clearer to us from a more distant vantage point in time.)
• Hou is particularly praised for having found a way in his style, content, formal and aesthetic sensibility to have remained both anchored in a culturally 'Chinese' tradition while also looking forward, innovating, and bringing modernity via a non-Chinese artform and medium to these traditions. Thereby he is both traditional and modern, not simply rehashing Chinese cultural artefacts nor aping Western cinema, but has brought about a productive symbiosis of the two.

Themes & Motifs:

• Taiwanese identity.
• Taiwanese history
• Personal memory
• The family unit
• Meals and banquets
• City vs Rural (migration, displacement)
• Trees, rural settings
• Highly elliptical narrative structure encouraging active/attentive viewership
• 'Master shot' aesthetic (long take, long shot)
• Static camera until 1993, mobile thereafter
• Very dense mise-en-scene
• Blocking and frame-within-frame compositions
• 'Iterated framings'
• Trains
• Travelling shots

Notes:
Hou was an auto-didact who made it into the film industry half by chance, after a misspent youth that could have ended, like many of his friends did, in a life of petty crime and hoodlum gangsterism. His natural talent and instinct are therefore to be reckoned with, but as Chu Tienwen remarks it is his ability to cultivate this natural instinct and continually develop it by looking for new directions/horizons which has made him the master filmmaker he is.

"...an oeuvre whose towering subject has been the entanglements of Taiwanese nationality and Chinese identity".

[personal memory]... It is important that Hou grew up in the countryside, and in the era before Taiwan's economic boom and the mass exodus to the cities which followed. From at least as early as Green Green Grass of Home, Hou begins inserting his personal and most deeply felt memories into his film, that is of a rural upbringing. This must also explain his particular affinity for the rural scenes in his first 3 films. But throughout his 1980s work, shots of trees, trains, fields, family gatherings around a table, etc all abound in his films, and are to his own admission inspired by his own memories of where he grew up and the sense of community that existed there. Of course, A Time to Live, A Time to Die represents the culmination of this approach of mining his own memory. (One can also remember the mango-tree childhood anecdote he told Assayas as an early formative memory which may partly have inspired his distanced objective cinematic outlook)

[approach to history/time]... his films convey a "sense of what it feels like to be a human being dwarfed and engulfed by time, and his passionate enactment of the ways people (not just individuals, but families, nations) navigate the quicksand of history."

A filmmaker of restraint rather than excess, and also one without an agenda or message to be droned into the audience (his films may be read as political but on a less obvious level, e.g. giving voice to aspects of Taiwanese culture and history previously taboo)... also non-judgmental, quotes Confucius maxim: "Observe and do not judge", which seems to stand for his formal/visual aesthetic as well as his attitude to characters. The beautiful paradox is that through this holding back, he makes us feel all the more a powerful emotion for his characters.

The sense of an austere, economic style that passes no judgment but simply records what happens, ..... Placing characters in a larger context does not heighten our awareness of forces working upon them so much as suggest the power of forces working beyond them. It produces a sense of remove without a corresponding sense of indifference.....

Inferential storytelling? (demands active engagement from audience, e.g. Dust in the Wind)

[Reception] "But all this neatly gift-wrapped unity of form and content has left Hou a little slippery, and his entry into art-house prominence here in the U.S. has been overshadowed somewhat by a long-running and rich film festival circuit mythology. Most who care to know had read about Hou long before they’d seen a frame he’d shot, and the near simultaneous availability of a bunch of his works here on DVD in 2001 and 2002 coupled with retrospectives and critical hosannas created a breathlessly rarified situation in which his films, especially the Nineties works, may have become more intriguing as objects to witness and admire than art to examine. Non-traveling cinephiles weren’t given the chance to grow with the artist, understand, say, how the weight of City of Sadness contributed to the several-year break between it and its follow-up, The Puppetmaster. The relative dearth of knowledge most western viewers possess about Taiwan coupled with his lush visual schemas only helped further exoticize his filmmaking."




Filmography:

• Cute Girl (Loveable You, 1980)
• Cheerful Wind (1981)
• The Green Green Grass of Home (1982)
• The Sandwich Man (1983)
• The Boys from Fengkuei
• A Summer at Grandpa's
• A Time to Live, a Time to Die
• Dust in the Wind
• Daughter of the Nile
• A City of Sadness
• The Puppetmaster
• Good Men, Good Women
• Goodbye South, Goodbye
• Flowers of Shanghai
• Millenium Mambo
• Cafe Lumiere
• Three Times
• Flight of the Red Balloon
• The Assassin

References:
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 189.
Chapter in Taiwan a Treasure Island
Hou Hsiao-hsien (JM Frodon ed.)
http://www.taiwancinema.com/fp_12434_136
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/aug/03/artsfeatures1 (comparison with S Ray)

World Cinema Viewing List

Afghanistan

• Siddiq Barmak (2)

Albania
Algeria

• The Battle of Algiers* (1966)
• L'opium et le baton (Ahmed Rachedi, 1969)
• Chronicle of the Years of Fire (Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, 1975)
• Omar Gatlato (Merzak Allouache, 1976)
• Until the Birds Return (Karim Moussaoui, 2017)

Angola
Argentina

• The Secret in their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella, 2009)
• La hora de los hornos (F. Solanas & O. Getino, 1968)
• Lisandro Alonso (2)
• Lucrecia Martel (4)
• Mariano Llinas (2)
• The Official Story (Luis Puenzo, 1985)
• Hombre mirando al sudeste (Eliseo Subiela, 1986)
• Martin Rejtman (1)
• Elefante blanco (Pablo Trapero, 2012)
• Wild Tales (Damian Szifron, 2014)
• Road to La Paz (Francisco Varone, 2014)
• El Movimiento (Benjamin Naishtat, 2015)
• The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams, 2016)
• Claudio Caldini (1)

Armenia

• The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1968)

Austria

• Michael Haneke
• Ulrich Seidl
• Antares (Gotz Spielmann, 2004)
• Markus Schleinzer (2)
• Peter Tscherkassky

Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Bangladesh

• A River Called Titash (1973, Ritwik Ghatak)

Belarus
Belgium

• Dardenne Brothers (7)
• Man Bites Dog (1992)
• Mr Nobody* (2009)
• Bullhead (2011)
• Our Children (2012)

Benin
Bolivia

• Blood of the Condor (1969, Jorge Sanjines)

Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil

• Limite (1931, Mario Peixoto)
• Orfeu Negro* (1959)
• Os Cafajestes (1962, Rui Guerra)
• Nelson Pereira dos Santos (3)
• Glauber Rocha (3)
• Pixote (1981)
• Central Station (1998)
• City of God (2002)
• Araby (2017, Affonso Uchoa & Joao Dumans)
• Kleber Mendonça Filho (2)
• Cinema Novo (documentary, 2016, Eryk Rocha)
• In the Intense Now (2017, João Moreira Salles)

Brunei
Bulgaria

• Kozijat Rog (1972)

Burkina Faso

• Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993)

Burundi
Cambodia

• Rithy Panh* (3)

Cameroon

• Muna Moto

Central African Republic
Chad

• Mahamat Saleh Haroun (2)

Chile

• Patricio Guzman (2)
• Pablo Larrain (3)
• Alejandro Jodorowsky* (2)
• Una mujer fantastica (2017, Sebastian Lelio)
• The Wolf House (2018)

China

• The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, 1934)
• The Big Road (Sun Yu, 1934)
• Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi, 1937)
• Fei Mu (2)
• Xie Jin (3)
• The One and Eight (Zhang Junzhao, 1983)
• The Black Cannon Incident (Huang Jianxin, 1985)
• Sacrificed Youth (Zhuang Nuanxin, 1985)
• Chen Kaige (6)
• Zhang Yimou (10)
• Tian Zhuangzhuang (3)
• Black Snow (Xie Fei, 1990)
• Ermo (Zhou Xiaowen, 1994)
• Blush (Li Shaohong, 1995)
• Little Red Flowers (Zhang Yuan, 2006)
• Jia Zhangke (9)
• Wang Xiaoshuai (5)
• Jiang Wen (3)
• Ning Ying (2)
• Wang Bing (2)
• Lou Ye (5)
• Li Yang (2)
• City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009)
• China's Bleak House (Zhao Liang, 2011)
• Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, 2014)
• Bi Gan (2)
• Crosscurrent (Yang Chao, 2016)
• The Summer is Gone (Zhang Dalei, 2016)
• Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu, 2017)
• Have a Nice Day (Liu Jian, 2017)

Colombia

• Maria, Full of Grace* (2004)
• Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2016)

Congo, Republic of the
Congo, Democratic Republic of the

• Lumumba* (2000, Raoul Peck)

Costa Rica
Cote d'Ivoire
Croatia
Cuba

• Soy Cuba* (1964)
• Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, 1968)

Cyprus
Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia

• Milos Forman* (4)
• Ikarie XB1 (1963, J. Polak)
• Intimate Lighting (1965, Ivan Passer)
• The Shop on Main Street (1965)
• And the Fifth Horseman was Fear (1965)
• Daisies (1966, Vera Chytilova)
• A Report on the Party and the Guests (Jan Nemec, 1966)
• The Cremator (1968, Juraj Herz)
• The Ear (1970, Karel Kachyna)
• The Witchhammer (1970, Otakar Vavra)
• Frantisek Vlacil (3)
• Jiri Menzel (2)
• Jaromil Jires (2)
• Kolya (1996)
• Jan Svankmajer
• I, Olga Hepnarova (2016)

Denmark

• Carl Theodor Dreyer (5)
• Haxan (1922)
• Hunger (1966)
• Lars von Trier ()
• Thomas Vinterberg* (3)
• Susanne Bier (2)

Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic

• Cocote (Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, 2017)

Ecuador
Egypt

• Youssef Chahine (4)
• Henry Barakat (2)
• Shadi Abdel-Salam (2)
• The Will (1939, Kamal Selim)
• The Road (1964, Houssam El-Din Mustafa)
• Clash (2016, Mohamed Diab)
• The Nile Hilton Incident (2017, Tariq Saleh)
• Sheikh Jackson (2017, Amr Salama)

El Salvador

• The Houses are Full of Smoke Part 2*

Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia

• Harvest 3000 Years (Haile Gerima)

Fiji
Finland

• Aki Kaurismaki (6)
• The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (Juho Kuosmanen, 2016)

Gabon
Gambia
Georgia

• Falling Leaves (Otar Iosseliani, 1966)
• Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze, 2017)

Ghana
Greece

• Theo Angelopoulos (1)
• Yorgos Lanthimos (1)

Grenada
Guatemala

• The Houses are Full of Smoke Part 1*
• Ixcanul (2015, Jayro Bustamante)

Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti

• Raoul Peck

Honduras
Hungary

• Bela Tarr (2)
• Miklos Jancso (3)
• Szindbád (1971, Zoltan Huszarik)
• Love (1971, Karoly Makk)
• White God (2014)
• Son of Saul (2015, Laszlo Nemes)
• Strangled (2016, Arpad Sopsits)
• Ildikó Enyedi (2)

Iceland
India

• Bimal Roy (2)
• Satyajit Ray (15)
• Ritwik Ghatak (2)
• Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor)
• The Hungry Stones (1960, Tapan Sinha)
• Uski Roti (Mani Kaul, 1970)
• Salaam Bombay (Mira Nair, 1988)
• Ram Ke Naam (Anand Patwardhan, 1992)
• I.D. (2012, Kamal K.M)
• The Lunchbox (2013)
• Newton (2017, Amit Masurkar)

Indonesia

• After the Curfew (Usmar Ismail, 1954)
• The Act of Killing*/The Look of Silence* (2012/2014)
• Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017, Mouly Surya)
• Edwin (2)
• Teguh Karya (0)

Iran

• Abbas Kiarostami* (15)
• Jafar Panahi (7)
• Mohsen Makhmalbaf (7)
• Samira Makhmalbaf (2)
• Kamran Shirdel (4)
• Dariush Mehrjui (3)
• Asghar Farhadi* (5)
• Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (2)
• Khosrow Sinai (2)
• The House is Black (1963, Forough Farrokhzad)
• Brick and Mirror (1965, Ebrahim Golestan)
• The Spring (1972, Arby Ovanessian)
• The Mongols (1973, Parviz Kimiavi)
• Prince Ehtejab (1974, Bahman Farmanara)
• Shohrab Shahid Saless (2)
• Amir Naderi (2)
• Bahram Beyzai (2)
• The Key (1987, Ebrahim Forouzesh)
• Children of Heaven (Majid Majidi, 1997)
• The Day I Became a Woman (2000, Marzieh Meshkini)
• Low Heights (2002, Ebrahim Hatamikia)
• Turtles Can Fly (2004, Bahman Ghobadi)
• Cafe Transit (2005, Kambuzia Partovi)
• God is Near (2006, Ali Vazirian)
• Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (2007, Hana Makhmalbaf)
• Please Don't Disturb (2010)
• Modest Reception (Mani Haghighi, 2012)
• Fish and Cat (2013, Shahram Mokri)
• Melbourne (2014)
• Pope (2014, Ehsan Abdipour)
• Don't Be Tired (2014)
• Neurasthenia (2014)
• With Others (Nasser Zamiri, 2014)
• Unwished (2015)
• Nahid (Ida Panahandeh, 2015)
• Lantouri (2016, Reza Dormishian)
• Tehran Taboo (2017)
• Tehran: City of Love (2018, Ali Jaberansari)

Iraq

• Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015, Abbas Fahdel)
• The Journey (2017, Mohammed Al-Daradji)

Israel

• Avi Mograbi (2)
• Ari Folman* (2)

Jamaica
Jordan

• Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar, 2015)

Kazakhstan

• Revenge (Ermek Shinarbaev, 1989)

Kenya
Kosovo
Kuwait

• The Cruel Sea (1972, Khalid Al Siddiq)

Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon

• Ziad Doueiri (2)
• Nadine Labaki (2)
• Yara (2018, Abbas Fahdel)

Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macedonia

• Before the Rain (1994)

Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia

• Sepet (2005, Yasmin Ahmad)
• Flower in the Pocket (2007, Liew Seng Tat)
• Shuttle Life (2017, Tang Seng Kiat)

Maldives
Mali

• Abderrahmane Sissako* (4)
• Souleymane Cissé (1)

Malta
Mauritania

• Abderrahmane Sissako* (4)
• Soleil Ô (1967, Med Hondo)

Mexico

• Luis Buñuel (2)
• Redes (1936)
• Enamorada (Emilio Fernandez, 1946)
• Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)
• Amores Perros (2000)
• Alfonso Cuaron* (3)
• Leap Year (Michael Rowe, 2010)
• La region salvaje (Amat Escalante, 2016)

Moldova
Mongolia

• The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005, Byambasuren Davaa)

Montenegro
Morocco

• A Thousand and One Hands (Souheil Ben-Barka, 1973)
• Trances (Ahmed Al Maanouni, 1981)
• Nabil Ayouch (2)
• Mille Mois (Faouzi Bensaidi, 2003)

Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands

• The Vanishing (1988)

Nicaragua

• The Houses are Full of Smoke Part 3*

Niger
Nigeria
North Korea

• A Broad Bellflower (1987)

Norway

• Joachim Trier (2)
• Insomnia (1997)
• Ni Liv (1957)

Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Palestine

• Hany Abu-Assad (2)
• Elia Suleiman (4)

Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru

• When Two Worlds Collide (2016, Heidi Brandenburg, Mathew Orzel)
• Song Without a Name (Melina Leon, 2019)

Philippines

• Three Years Without God (1976, Mario O'Hara)
• Perfumed Nightmare (1977, Kidlat Tahimik)
• Brillante Mendoza (3)
• Lino Brocka (3)
• Lav Diaz (3)
• Ishmael Bernal (1)
• Graceland (2012, Ron Morales)
• On the Job (2013, Erik Matti)

Poland

• Andrzej Wajda (5)
• Andrzej Munk (1)
• Jerzy Skolimowski (2)
• Kzryzstof Zanussi (4)
• Roman Polanski* ()
• Mother Joan of the Angels (1961, Jerzy Kawalerowicz)
• The Saragossa Manuscript (1965, Wojciech Has)
• Interrogation (1980)
• Kzryzstof Kieslowski* 
• Escape from the Liberty Cinema (1990, Wojciech Marczewski)

Portugal

• Aniki Bobo (1942, Manoel de Oliveira)
• Colossal Youth (2006, Pedro Costa)
• Tabu (2011, Miguel Gomes)
• The Ornithologist (2016, Joao Pedro Rodrigues)

Qatar
Romania

• Cristian Mungiu (3)
• Cristi Puiu (3)
• Corneliu Porumboiu (4)
• Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2010)
• Child's Pose (2013, Calin Peter Netzer)
• Radu Jude (2)

Rwanda
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome and Principe
Saudi Arabia

• Wadjda (2012)

Senegal

• Djibril Diop Mambety (3)
• Ousmane Sembene (7)
• Toubab Bi (Moussa Toure, 1991)
• Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2019)

Serbia

• Dusan Makavejev (4)
• Emir Kusturica* (2)
• I Even Met Happy Gypsies (Aleksandr Petrovic, 1967)
• Balkan Spy (1984)
• Pretty Village Pretty Flame (1996, Srdan Dragojevic)

Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Singapore

• Eric Khoo (2)
• Anthony Chen (2)
• Untracing the Conspiracy (Jason Khoo, 2015)
• Lulu the Movie (2016)
• Pop Aye (Kristen Tan, 2016)
• A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua, 2018)
• Shirkers (Sandi Tan, 2018)

Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Africa

• Tsotsi (2005, Gavin Hood)
• U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005)
• The Wound (2017, John Trengove)

South Korea

• The Hand of Fate (1955, Han Hyeong-mo)
• The Coachman
• The Housemaid (1960, Kim Ki-young)
• Aimless Bullet
• Shin Sang-ok (0)
• Kim Soo-yong (3)
• Lee Man-hee (3)
• The Last Witness (1980, Lee Doo-yong)
• Lee Jang-ho (2)
• Im Kwon-taek (6)
• Jang Sun-woo (3)
• Park Kwang-su (2)
• Hong Sang-soo (4)
• The President's Barber (Lim Chan-sang, 2004)
• Na Hong-jin (2)
• A Girl at My Door (2014, July Jung)
• Collective Invention (2015, Kwon Oh-kwang)
• Kim Jee-woon (3)
• Memoir of a Murderer (2017, Won Shin-yeon)
• Bong Joon-ho (5)
• Lee Chang-dong (6)
• Kim Ki-duk (2)
• Park Chan-wook (4)

South Sudan
Sri Lanka
Sudan

• Talking About Trees (2019)

Suriname
Swaziland
Switzerland
Syria

• The Dupes (1972, Tawfik Saleh)
• Nabil Maleh (2)
• Omar Amiralay (2)
• Dreams of the City (1984, Mohammed Malas)
• Silvered Water (2014, Ossama Mohammed, Wiam Bedirxan)
• Last Men in Aleppo (2017, Feras Fayyad)

Taiwan

• Hou Hsiao-Hsien (17)
• Edward Yang (7)
• Tsai Ming-Liang (7)
• Ang Lee* (1)
• In Our Time (1982)
• The Sandwich Man (1983)
• Growing Up (Chen Kunhou/HHH, 1983)
• A Borrowed Life (Wu Nien-jen, 1994)
• Adon Wu (2)
• The Great Buddha+ (Huang Hsin-yao, 2017)
• Cities of Last Things (Wi Ding Ho, 2018)

Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand

• Butterfly & Flowers (Euthana Mukdasanit, 1985)
• Apichatpong Weerasethakul (4)
• Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (2)
• Pop Aye (Kristen Tan, 2016)
• By the Time It Gets Dark (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2016)
• Malila: The Farewell Flower (Anucha Boonyawatana, 2017)

Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia

• The Dove's Lost Necklace (Nacer Khemir, 1992)

Turkey

• Nuri Bilge Ceylan (7)
• Yilmaz Guney (2)
• Dry Summer (Metin Erksan, 1964)
• The Law of the Border (Lutfi O. Akad, 1966)

Turkmenistan
Uganda
Ukraine

• The Tribe (2014)
• Sergei Loznitsa* (14)

United Arab Emirates
Uruguay

• Una vida util (2010, Federico Veiroj)

Uzbekistan
Venezuela

• From Afar (2015, Lorenzo Vigas)

Vietnam

• The Little Girl of Hanoi (1975)
• Tran Anh Hung (2)
• Dang Nhat Minh (2)

Yemen
Zambia

• I Am Not a Witch (2017, Rungano Nyoni)

Zimbabwe