Friday, December 4 | 8 p.m.
Also like Life: the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien
An International retrospective organized by Richard I. Suchenski (Director, Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College), in collaboration with the the Taiwan Film Institute and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The book Hou Hsiao-hsien (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum and New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) has been released in conjunction with this retrospective.
A seminal achievement in the Taiwanese new wave and considered by many to rank among the greatest films of the 1980s, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece presents an essentially universal coming-of-age story set against one family’s struggle to adjust to life in a new land. Spanning a period of nearly two decades, A Time to Live and a Time to Die opens in 1947, when a man and his family leave mainland China to settle in a village in Taiwan. As time goes by, Ah-ha matures from childhood into adolescence, becoming involved with a street gang, as he grows older. Making expert use of naturalistic performances and a long-take, deep-focus cinematography that helps create the film’s considerable emotional impact, Hou’s family opus has earned justifiable comparisons to Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy and the films of Yasujiro Ozu.
Director Hou Hsiao-hsien 1985 Taiwan 138 minutes NR 35mm
