Trivia

Jim Jarmusch called Hou his "teacher".

It was only because critics kept telling him how much his own work resembled that of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu that he decided to explore it. He first saw Ozu's films in Paris, in the mid-1980s.

French film-maker Olivier Assayas admired Hou so much that in 1997, he made a feature length documentary about him: HHH: Portrait de Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Recalls how, as a child, he climbed a tree to steal mangos, and while looking down experienced "an acute sense of space and time" that later helped inspire him to become a filmmaker.

He is the 25th generation of his family. He still sends money to maintain a family temple in China.

Since his departure from China as a young boy, he only returned to the mainland in 1997 to film "Flowers of Shanghai" (1998), which was shot on location.

A major figure in the Taiwanese New Cinema movement.

Was voted "Director of the Decade (1990s)" in a poll of international film critics put together by the Village Voice and Film Comment.

Education: National Taiwan Arts Academy (film)