Hou Hsiao-Hsien Retrospective
Hou Hsiao-hsien, the visionary director who brought Taiwan New Cinema to the global stage, is known for his contemplative long takes and a visual language uniquely his own. “Darkness,” he once said, “comes from reality and absurdity.” Rejecting artifice, Hou captures the everyday with piercing honesty, rendering moments we all can relate to—whether it’s childhood sweethearts struggling in the city, disillusioned gangsters drifting through life, or a lone assassin bound by fate. Join Giloo in refocusing on the present, and see the island through Hou Hsiao-hsien’s lens: a poetic realism shaped by his profound love for this land.
6 films
Flight of the Red Balloon
The Assassin
Three Times
Dust in the Wind
The Time to Live and the Time to Die
Portrait of Hou-Hsiao-Hsien
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Those irreversible slices of life
Recently, in a novel I've come to love, I found myself grasping the weight of life's slices. In the story, there is a wicked sorcerer who freezes people in the instant just before tragedy strikes—suspending everything, sealing it into a crystal ball, and building an entire museum from these frozen moments. And isn't film, in its own way, just as cruel? As viewers, we are little more than instruments for collecting tissue slices—slipping into a character's world for a single fleeting moment, wandering through it in passing, only to return, in the blink of an eye, to the reality that is our own.