Hou Hsiao-Hsien
| Hou Hsiao-hsien | |||||||||
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Hou in February 2016 at a screening of The Assassin at the Cinémathèque Française.
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| Background information | |||||||||
| Chinese name | 侯孝賢 (traditional) | ||||||||
| Chinese name | 侯孝贤 (simplified) | ||||||||
| Pinyin | Hóu Xiàoxián (Mandarin) | ||||||||
| Born |
8 April 1947 Mei County, Guangdong, Republic of China |
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| Occupation | Film director Screenwriter Producer Actor |
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Awards
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Hou Hsiao-hsien (born 8 April 1947) is a Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin (2015).
Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics put together by The Village Voice and Film Comment. In a 1998 New York Film Festival worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema." In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, fourteen critics and two directors named A City of Sadness one of the ten greatest films ever made, placing it at #117 in the overall critics' poll.
A Hakka, Hou Hsiao-Hsien was born in Mei County, Guangdong province (China) in 1947. He and his family fled the Chinese Civil War to Taiwan the following year. Hou was educated at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts.
Internationally, Hou is known for his austere and aesthetically rigorous dramas dealing with the upheavals of Taiwanese (and occasionally larger Chinese) history of the past century by viewing its impacts on individuals or small groups of characters. A City of Sadness (1989), for example, portrays a family caught in conflicts between the local Taiwanese and the newly arrived Chinese Nationalist government after World War II. It was groundbreaking for broaching the long-taboo February 28 Incident and ensuing White Terror. It became a major critical and commercial success, and garnered the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, making it the first Taiwanese film to win the top prize at the prestigious international film festival.
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