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Singapore International Film Festival (Sgiff) has unveiled the full programme for its 35th edition, which includes honorary awards for Taiwanese actors Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei, and the launch of a Sgiff Industry Days conference.

Set to run from November 28 - December 8, the festival will continue to champion local and regional voices, with Asian cinema representing 80% of the line-up. The full selection comprises 105 films from 45 countries and features recurring themes of migration and displacement as well as the influence of technology on the medium of film.

The Asian Feature Film Competition, the festival’s main competition section, showcases nine features by promising directors across Asia,...

Tsai Ming Liang Guide: As the 20th century drew to a close, cinema, like other art forms, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Hollywood, in a desperate attempt to keep audiences engaged, embraced new technological advancements, such as improved visual effects. It sought to captivate the masses by blurring the lines between reality and imagination, producing sci-fi blockbusters like “Terminator 2” (1991), “Jurassic Park” (1993), and “Armageddon” (1998). However, thousands of miles away from sunny Los Angeles, another group of filmmakers across Europe and Asia consciously took cinema in a different direction. Rather than helping audiences forget the fourth wall, they aimed to reinforce it, creating films that were acutely aware of their own impact, intentionally distancing viewers from the on-screen events by withholding the cut.

In contemporary film theory, this shift is referred to as ‘Slow Cinema.’ To an avid cinephile, it is now a fairly common term. Maestros like Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa,...

Taiwan International Co-Funding Program (Ticp) from Taiwan Creative Content Agency (Taicca) continues to make an impact at the 74th Berlinale. Black Tea and Shambhala enter the main competition, while Sleep With Your Eyes Open competes at Encounters. Festival veteran Tsai Ming-Liang scored two official selections with his latest documentary Abiding Nowhere in Berlinale Special and The Wayward Cloud at Berlinale Classics Special.

Black Tea is Abderrahmane Sissako's follow up feature after Timbuktu with Taiwan as a key location and two Taiwanese actors Chang Han from A Brighter Summer Day and Wu Ke-Xi of Nina Wu playing alongside Nina Mélo in this cross-cultural romance. The film also received investment from Kaohsiung Film Fund.

Also in the main competition is Shambhala, the second feature from Nepal's Min Bahadur Bham, which sees a woman journey across the Himalayas to prove her innocence. Liao Ching-Sung and Roger Huang are two executive producers from...

Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-liang, who has two films in the Berlinale this year, is a contrarian who would be almost at home working with art-galleries and museums as cinemas and film festivals. Indeed, his new “Abiding Nowhere” is part financed by the Smithsonian Institute.

“Abiding Nowhere,” which premieres on Monday in the Encounters section and consists of lonely wanderings through Washington DC by a barefoot monk, is, by Tsai’s own admission, “not a normal film.”

“It does not have a story or a plot. There are no performances and no language. It shares similarities with my other films, but pushed to extremes. Perhaps it is incomprehensible,” said Tsai, Friday, at a Berlin masterclass. “I’m not trying to tell you anything through script or performance. It could be perfect for a gallery or museum, but I still hope it plays in theaters.”

It is the second time that Tsai...

Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, the arthouse darling known for works including Venice Golden Lion winner “Vive L’Amour” and “The River,” which scored the Berlin Silver Bear, will be celebrated by the Locarno Film Festival with its Honorary Leopard achievement award.

The iconoclastic auteur, who is a key figure in Taiwan’s so-called Second New Wave, will receive the prize from the Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema during an Aug. 6 ceremony held on its 8,000-seat outdoor Piazza Grande venue.

The tribute to Tsai Ming-liang will also involve an onstage conversation with the director on the future of cinema and a screening of the helmer’s 2020 film “Days” (Rizi), as well as an art gallery exhibition of his experimental works.

The Malaysian-born Tsai made his debut in the early 1990s, breaking out internationally with “Vive L’Amour” 1994, followed by “The River” in 1996 and “The Hole,” which bowed in Cannes in 1998. His “The Wayward Cloud...

Sculptor turned director Wu Lang made a splash at the Berlin Film Festival with his debut feature “Absence” playing in the festival’s showcase Encounters section.

With a high-profile cast headed by Lee Kang-sheng (“What Time Is It There?” “The Wayward Cloud”) and Li Meng “Absence” is an art-house romance that uses skyscapes and urban landscapes as metaphors for inner feelings. The seduction starts with a man’s return to Hainan Island after ten years in jail and ends with a flock of sheep in an abandoned construction site.

Variety: This film has the same cast as your previous short film of the same title. In notes you’ve said that the two works are connected, but one is not an expansion of the other.

Wu: Shooting the first short film for me had two purposes. First, making a film is not easy in terms of financing and finding coproducers.

Festival will also host tributes to Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang and late director Shinji Aoyama.

US director Julie Taymor is to preside over the international competition jury of Tokyo International Film Festival, which has also announced plans to revive the Akira Kurosawa Award and host tribute screenings to Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang and late Japanese director Shinji Aoyama.

The festival has unveiled highlights of its 35th edition, which will run October 24 to November 2, ahead of the announcement of its full line up on September 21.

Taymor is known for directing features such as Frida, Titus, Across The Universe and The Glorias...

Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s short “The Moon and the Tree” will world premiere at the upcoming Taipei Film Festival. The 23rd iteration will be held in-person from Sept. 23 to Oct. 9.

“The Moon and the Tree” will debut after Tsai’s 19-minute short “The Night” opens out of competition at Venice.

This will mark the third consecutive year that the Taipei Film Festival has featured work from Tsai. It screened his short “Your Face” in 2019, and his films “Days” and “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” in 4K restoration in 2020.

“Although it’s a short film, I’m serious about my participation in the festival,” Tsai said. He will participate in a discussion with the audience at the fest.

“The Moon and the Tree” features and tells the story of notable Taiwanese artists Lee Pei-jing and Chang Feng.

Lee rose to fame in the 1970s with her pop hit “I Love the Moon,...

A plumber drills a hole between the basement of one apartment and the ceiling of another as a strange disease that causes people to act like cockroaches sweeps over Taiwan at the turn of the millennium. A depressed homeless man, desperate to provide for his family but invisible to the people who drive past his roadside advertising sign, violently mauls the cabbage that his young daughter has adopted as a friend. A Taipei cinema screens King Hu’s “Dragon Inn” during a torrential downpour on its final night in business as various patrons shuffle around inside the theater, each of them looking for a connection that seems to be flickering away forever before our eyes.

While Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang has long been associated with slow cinema, the non-linear deceleration of his style has been interjected with soaring dreamscapes, electric moments of self-reflexivity, and even a handful of sexually charged musical numbers.

"A spare, melancholy story..." Grasshopper Film has unveiled a US trailer for the film Days, the latest work from Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang. This originally premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival last year just before the pandemic shut everything down. It received some mixed reviews, with a few critics raving about it. The film is made up of nearly "two-dozen fixed-frame shots held for around 5 minutes each" and that's it. Set in Bangkok about two strangers. Kang lives alone in a big house, Non in a small apartment. They meet, and then part, their days flowing on as before. This stars Lee Kang-sheng and Anong Houngheuangsy. This slow cinema definitely isn't for everyone, but it should connect most with anyone already familiar with Tsai Ming-liang's style. Take a look. Here's the official US trailer (+ poster) for Tsai Ming-liang's Days, direct from Grasshopper's YouTube: Under the pain of illness and treatment,...

We have been crazy about Tsai Ming-liang’s Days for quite a while—premiering at Berlin 2020, which will go down as the last gasp of film culture as we knew it before Covid completely rewrote the rules, will do that. Thus the movie’s occupied a nether region since: those who saw Days managed to land it on our best of 2020 list, while the rest of us call it one of the best 2021 films we’ve already seen. Having caught it on the festival circuit and being stunned yet again by Tsai’s complete, total mastery of a form oft-imitated but never bested, I dare call these lines arbitrary. What in fact matters is that Grasshopper Film will finally release Days on August 13. Thus the U.S. trailer is here to set a distinctly Tsai-ian tone.

Much like Days itself, this lacks subtitles, instead evoking urban sprawl, natural force, and...

The 2020 Berlinale marks the 70th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. The anniversary, which took place from February 20 to March 1, 2020, was the first festival headed by director duo Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. This year, seven Chinese-language films[1] produced by filmmakers from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan were screened at Berlinale. This article discusses the films individually through a brief account of their content and an introduction of their filmmakers.

1. Rizi (Days)- Competition

Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang with Lee Kang-Sheng, Anong Houngheuangsy.

Taiwan 2019, Without dialogue, 127’, World premiere

Winner Teddy Jury Award, Berlinale

No International Sales Agent (Isa)

Among the 18 films in the main competition section, Rizi (Days) is the only Chinese-language film. The film, delving into the colossal topic of loneliness through a depiction of the time two marginalized male protagonists spent in a hotel in Bangkok, was given the Teddy Award on February 28. Tsai spent 4 years shooting this unplanned,...

This ‘slow cinema’ legend has now abandoned all dialogue. As the UK Taiwan film festival kicks off, he talks about his latest work – about a man with neck pain who owns a fish

‘In my childhood, cinema was like going into a temple. Now, it’s more like going into a shopping mall,” says Tsai Ming-liang. Over the course of his nearly 30-year career, the Taiwanese film-maker’s work has moved further and further towards the “temple” end of the spectrum. Often bracketed under the “slow cinema” movement, he is a master of the very long take. His last feature, 2013’s Stray Dogs, included a shot of two people staring at a mural in an abandoned building that lasted over 14 minutes. But despite his shaven head, Tsai is no monk. In the past, his films have featured choreographed musical sequences, surreal comedy, and plenty of sex – gay, straight, solo, even watermelon-incorporating,...

Urban Distribution International has just dropped an international trailer for “The Guest,” the second feature of Italian director Duccio Chiarini (“Short Skin”) which the Locarno Festival confirmed as one of its Piazza Grande titles, a space usually reserved for what it conceives as its biggest crowd-pleasers.

Udi’S French theatrical arm, Urban Distribution, will release “The Guest” in France; Swiss distribution will be handled by First Hand Films.

“The Guest,” from a trailer made available in exclusivity to Variety, would seem to fit the bill. An end-of-relationship drama -comedy developed at Cannes’ Cinefondation La Résidence, which picks up on up-and-coming stronger voiced auteurs from around the world, “The Guest” turns on near-40 Guido, played dopey-ishly by Daniele Parisi (“Orecchie”), an academic for ever preparing a book on Italo Calvino.

A pregnancy scare, caught in the trailer, is for Guido maybe a sign that he and longtime g.f. Chiara should have a family; for Chiara,...

'I am the best film director in the world,' proclaimed Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier to a packed press conference for his film Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, after its premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. 'All the others,' he added later in the conversation, 'are overrated.' If you were to be asked what filmmaker could have made such a comment, you'd be hard-pressed to think of a more likely prospect than von Trier, the Dogme 95 leader who has consistently pushed the boundaries of what cinema will allow. In The Idiots (Idioterne), a film he made adhering to the ascetic boundaries erected by Dogme, he gave us an art film featuring unsimulated sex scenes. The practice may strike you as not particularly shocking now, with films like Romance, The Brown Bunny, The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun), Destricted, and 9 Songs all having...

SEOUL -- Veteran filmmakers will mingle with aspiring first-timers at an increasingly internationalized 10th anniversary edition of the Pusan Promotion Plan, scheduled for Oct. 8-11 in the South Korean beach resort of Pusan, organizers said Tuesday.

The PPP -- under the Asian Film Market's umbrella since last year -- will feature 35 projects from 18 countries throughout Asia and several projects chosen from outside the region.

Broader than ever in geographical scope, this year's PPP includes international projects from Armenia and Nepal and seven co-productions with partners from outside Asia, including the U.S. and South Africa.

Chosen from 200 applications, the PPP selections this year include projects from such prominent producers as Terrence Chang ("Face/Off," Mission: Impossible II), Peter Fudakowski (Tsotsi), Tsai Ming-liang (The Wayward Cloud) and Hong Sang-soo.

With the mission of discovering and supporting promising Asian talent, the PPP has seen more than 90 of its 234 projects made into finished films. Among those titles are Siddiq Barmak's Osama, winner of the Golden Globe for best foreign language film in 2005; Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle, winner of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 2001; and Bong Joon-ho's The Host, which went on to become the highest-grossing film in Korean history.

MADRID -- David Slade's Hard Candy was the big winner as the Sitges International Film Festival wrapped Monday, winning the best film, script and audience awards. Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To took the best director honors for his Election, while Lee Yeong-ae won best actress for her role in Korean Chan-wook Park's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud from Taiwan garnered the best actor nod for Lee Kang-sheng and the special jury prize for what the jury called "its bold aesthetic and moral discourse against sexual alienation."...

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- After winning three awards at the recently concluded Berlin International Film Festival, Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud will be released uncut via Twentieth Century Fox's local office in Taiwan after initially being banned by Taiwan's censorship authorities unless the film underwent editing. Taiwan's censors granted a screening permit Thursday after originally deciding the film could not be released unless cuts were made to some of the film's sexually explicit scenes. Earlier this week, Malaysia-born Tsai said he would not make the film available for release in Taiwan if censors insisted on cutting any scenes. But at a re-inspection meeting Thursday, 15 censors reached a nine-to-six allowing the film be released uncut with a Restricted (for adults only) classification.