Background
HOU, Hsiao-hsien was born on April 8, 1947 in Meixian, Guangdong, China.
HOU, Hsiao-hsien was born on April 8, 1947 in Meixian, Guangdong, China.
Educated at Taipei National Academy, of Arts film and drama department.
Chiu shih liu-liu-te t’a (Cute Girl) 1981, Feng-erh t’i-t’a-ts’ai (Cheerful Wind) 1982, Tsai na ho-pan ch'ing-ts’ao-ch’ing (Green Grass of Home) 1982, Erh-tzu-te ta wan-ou (The Sandwich Man) 1983, Feng-kuei-lai-te jen (The Boys from Fengkuei/All the Y'outhful Days) 1983, Tung-tung-te chia-ch'i (A Summer at Grandpa's) 1984, T'ung-nien wang-shih (The Time to Live and the Time to Die) 1985, Lienlien feng-ch’en (Dust in the Wind/Rite of Passage) 1986, Ni-lo-ho nii-erh (Daughter of the Nile) 1987, Pei-ch’ing ch’eng-shih (A City of Sadness) 1989 (winner of Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival). Worked as an electronic calculator salesman. Entered film industry in 1973. Assistant, to several dirs. from 1974.
Ang Lee and Hon Hsiao-Hsien are just seven years apart in age. Ang Lee was actually born in Taiwan, whereas Hou arrived there only at the age of one, brought by parents escaping the Communist upheaval in China. Yet, by now, Ang Lee is one of the best-known directors in the world, the bold master of so many supposedly foreign idioms, while Hou is hardly known outside the narrow circuit of international film festivals. He is also a person who travels reluctantly, and who therefore finds his material in the experience of Taiwan. As Godfrey Cheshire put it, “Taiwan looks at itself in Hou’s films and confronts indeterminacy: people, places, and eras caught always in the (lux of becoming something else.
Hou is an extraordinary director—gentle, reflective, beautifully composed, inclined to hold his shots in space and duration. He exemplifies that natural, fluent style that unites so many of the most thoughtful directors.