Quote:
A Complex Taiwan Tale Needs a Key
In a series of eloquent, dazzling and demanding films, the director Hou Hsiao-hsien has depicted the history of Taiwan through individuals with deeply moving life stories. The island itself — a Japanese colony before World War II, then controlled by the Nationalist Chinese with violent repression during the cold-war years — has come to seem his most treasured character. “City of Sadness,” shown at the New York Film festival in 1989, tells Taiwan’s story as a family saga. The poetic “Puppetmaster,” shown at the festival two years ago, layers Taiwan’s history with the biography of an aged puppet maker. Now, in “Good Men, Good Women,” Mr. Hou depicts Taiwan in an even more complex way, blending history with fiction, and juxtaposing the present with recent memories. He even includes a fact-based, black-and-white movie within this elegantly shot film. “Good Men, Good Women” will be shown as part of the New York Film Festival this afternoon at 2. It is one of the most richly imagined and also one of the most difficult films in the series.

The film is truly baffling unless you walk in knowing about the plot and characters and about the chronology that Mr. Hou shatters then asks his viewers to reconstruct. At the center is Liang Ching, a thoroughly contemporary actress who is receiving frightening faxes. Someone has stolen her diary, and when they fax copies of its pages back to her, they set off memories of her lover, Ah Wei, a shady character who was murdered several years before. The contemporary scenes and recent flashbacks are shot in bright, harsh colors that suggest the lurid unhappiness of Liang Ching’s life.

Liang Ching is also about to start filming a historical movie called “Good Men, Good Women.” As she prepares to play the heroine, Chiang Bi-yu, we see black-and-white episodes from the movie as she imagines it. In 1940, Chiang Bi-yu and her husband leave Taiwan for mainland China to fight the Japanese who are trying to take over the country. But they are almost executed as spies for the Japanese. After the war, back in Taiwan, they become political victims of the Nationalists.

Chiang Bi-yu’s story is told chronologically, with long sections scattered throughout the film. The product of Liang Ching’s imagination, this movie-in-a-movie is a stately, historical drama, the exact opposite of the sophisticated, fragmented story Mr. Hou is creating in the film’s larger view.

Using his typical style, Mr. Hou’s camera takes a serene, often distant position from all he observes, slowly allowing the pieces to fit together and the emotional resonance to make itself felt. The sad Liang Ching sees herself in the character she plays. In a flashback she remembers discussing a possible pregnancy and abortion with Ah Wei; in the black-and-white movie, Chiang Bi-yu has a son and gives him up so she can go on fighting the Japanese. By the end, Liang Ching’s apparently tenuous connection to Chiang Bi-yu evokes a stunning emotional response. “Good Men, Good Women” is not obscure for its own sake; it is a rigorous work of art whose mysteries are worth unraveling. GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; written (in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, Cantonese and Fujian, with English subtitles) by Chu Tien-wen, based on an original play by Chiang Bi-yu and Lan Bo-chow; director of photography, Chen Hwai-en; edited by Liao Ching-song; music by Mr. Chen and Chiang Hsiao-wen; produced by Katsuhiro Mizuno, Shozo Ichiyama, King Jieh-wen and Ben Hsieh. At Alice Tully Hall today at 2 P.M. as part of the 33d New York Film Festival. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Annie Shizuka Inoh (Liang Ching/ Chiang Bi-yu), Lim Giong (Chung Hao-tung) and Jack Kao (Ah Wei)
Caryn James, NY Times, October 7, 1995

Good.Men.Good.Women.1995.DVDRip.x264-SMz.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 48mn
Size: 	1.59 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	684x460 ~> 817x460
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 850 Kbps
BPP: 	0.245
Audio
#1:  	Chinese AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/2CA575CDFD0BB7E/Good.Men.Good.Women.1995.DVDRip.x264-SMz.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Min Nan
Subtitles:English, Japanese, Chinese

The post Hsiao-hsien Hou – Hao nan hao nu AKA Good Men, Good Women (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Nick Schager – Lessons of Darkness wrote:
As the new millennium dawns, Vicky (Qi Shu) balances separate love affairs with abusive, drug-smoking Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) and paternal petty gangster Jack (Jack Kao) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Millennium Mambo. Narrated (in hindsight) by Vicky from the year 2011, the film’s splintered, flashback-heavy narrative nominally concerns Vicky’s tumultuous two romances, though the storyline is – even more than usual for Hou – largely inconsequential. Supposedly part of a trilogy about Taiwanese youth culture, Millennium Mambo is similar to Hou’s superior Goodbye South, Goodbye in that both chart small-timers’ aimless search for money, love, or, at least, some fleeting feeling of genuine human connection. As is his custom, Hou frames his bored, detached protagonist (who, in a telling early scene, lies motionless as Hao-Hao sexually ravages her body) in doorways and hallways, thus visualizing Vicky’s inability (or unwillingness) to abandon her vacant, static existence for something more fulfilling. Nonetheless, Vicky’s narration alludes to her eventual evolution, as does the ravishing opening sequence (seemingly set in 2011) in which she prances down a deserted walkway and – one can sense – away from the tedium and madness of her former life. Despite its techno-enhanced rhythm and stunning cinematography by In the Mood for Love’s Mark Lee Ping-bin – who uses bold, primary colors to create a pulsating vision of Taiwan nightlife – there’s a noticeable redundancy about Hou’s latest. But as proven by moments like Vicky leaving a temporary face-print in the snow – one of the film’s many stirring visions of the transitory nature of life – even a minor Hou effort is brimming with poignant artistry.

Cian si man po aka Millennium Mambo - Hsiao-Hsien Hou (2001).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 45 min
Size: 	3.79 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 501 kb/s
BPP: 	0.331
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s (Fixed audio from DVD TF1)

https://nitro.download/view/E756ABB37BAAA5A/Cian_si_man_po_aka_Millennium_Mambo_-_Hsiao-Hsien_Hou_(2001).mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English, French, Swedish

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Qian xi man bo aka Millennium Mambo (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Three vignettes from three different directors that tell stories of ordinary people during Taiwan’s Cold War period.

Quote:
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s contribution to The Sandwich Man, an omnibus based on contemporary Taiwanese author Huang Chun-ming’s stories of the working class in 1960s Taiwan, and featuring then new-generation Taiwanese filmmakers that also includes Zhuang Xiang Zeng and Wan Jen, The Son’s Big Doll is a spare, elegantly conceived, understatedly realized, provocative, and insightful portrait of sacrifice, perseverance, and human dignity. Using asequential flashbacks, narrative ellipses, anecdotal conversations, and prefiguring sound (and dialogue), Hou incorporates complex, yet minimalist structure that would come to define his distinctive cinema.

The.Sandwich.Man.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 46 min
Size: 	2.47 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.221
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 2.0ch FLAC @ 323 kb/s (Mandarin)

https://nitro.download/view/9D24BC50637011B/The.Sandwich.Man.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/5495CC0B58F3BBB/The.Sandwich.Man.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/F7599DAC97F6BBC/The.Sandwich.Man.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/434B00DE166E82D/The.Sandwich.Man.1983.BDRIP.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.part3.rar

Language(s):Mandarin, Min Nan
Subtitles:English

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou & Chuang-Hsiang Tseng & Jen Wan – Er zi de da wan ou AKA The Sandwich Man (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Shochiku Studio of Japan commissioned several directors to create films reflecting on the themes of Ozu Yasujiro on the centenary of the director’s birth. Here we find Inoue Yoko, an apparently single young woman who is pregnant, searching for a small cafe that was often visited by a Taiwanese composer whose life she is researching. She herself is back from Taiwan and receiving help from a book store clerk, but she first has to contend with the her own reality which includes her parents.

Cafe.Lumiere.2003.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 43 min
Size: 	2.33 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.221
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/30FDEF23C3B0678/Cafe.Lumiere.2003.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Kôhî jikô AKA Café Lumière (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.

2.11GB | 1h 39m | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/AC4668094DF88E2/Feng_gui_lai_de_ren_(1983).mkv

Language:Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Feng gui lai de ren AKA The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The semi-autobiographical film on director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s childhood and adolescence, when he was growing up in Taiwan, living through the deaths of his father, mother and grandmother.

2.78GB | 2h 16m | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/C1A0B0BB5832A62/A_Time_to_Live_and_a_Time_to_Die.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/765C3ADC34B0E6D/A_Time_to_Live_and_a_Time_to_Die.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/00AB86C4BB5EF0A/A_Time_to_Live_and_a_Time_to_Die.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/6FE0898B39EC9C6/A_Time_to_Live_and_a_Time_to_Die.part3.rar

Language(s):Mandarin, Hakka
Subtitles:English

The post Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Tóngnián wangshì AKA A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge), first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d’Orsay, tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first western film. It is based on the classic French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse. Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It’s a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou’s starting point–dictated by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, which commissioned the film–is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.
Hou’s on-screen surrogate for his entree to Western filmmaking is Song, a Chinese film student in Paris working as a nanny to a young boy, Simon. (She’s also shooting a movie on the streets of Paris involving a red balloon, and has Simon take part.) Simon’s mother is Suzanne, played with great eccentricity and anxiousness by Juliette Binoche, sporting a shock of blond hair atop an intense, friendly but largely unhappy face. Suzanne works in a puppet theater (a fairly explicit reference to one of Hou’s previous films, The Puppetmasters) and lives alone with Simon in a cluttered apartment. The place downstairs is hers, too, but the tenants–friends of her estranged husband–have stopped paying rent. She’s eager to throw them out not only because she expects her older daughter will soon need a place to stay in Paris, but also because the couple is, to her mind anyway, ill-mannered, untidy, and inconsiderate.That’s it in a nutshell. Working to some degree in improvisational mode, Hou doesn’t generate a lot of narrative, but his images–emphasizing the quality of light passed through windows, or reflected in glass–are masterful and riveting. At times the visual strategy reminded me of Kieslowski, but then there’s something less structured and more free about Hou’s style. Kieslowski’s French-language films were insistent in their beauty, aggressive in their mystery. But nothing in Red Balloon feels especially calculated, or even pre-meditated. Instead, Hou pulls off the illusion that he’s just working the camera and the screen space verité-style, trying to get the best angle on Suzanne’s unfolding personal crisis, on Simon’s young sense of wonder, on Song’s tranquil face, lurking around the margins of every scene, sometimes with a camcorder in hand–as always, the filmmaker as tourist, spectator and eavesdropper. She’s also a surrogate mother here: she’s shooting a film, on DV, about a red balloon floating through the streets of Paris, and she has involved Simon in the picture. A quick glance around the net shows that many viewers have been frustrated, angered even, by the film’s languors. I can understand that it would seem little more than a pretty, exceptionally well-crafted trifle if not for the presence of Binoche, whose single mom is a credible, sympathetic creation. It’s a wholly un-selfconscious performance that sneaks up on you until Hou and Binoche both let ‘er rip in a couple of key scenes where Suzanne jabbers helplessly into her cell phone–that symbol of simultaneous connectivity and disconnectedness–her feelings of lonesomeness and abandonment palpable enough almost to transform Red Balloon into tragedy.
But then there’s Simon, learning piano and growing street-smart, building up his understanding of the world around him even as he wonders at the benevolence of the bright red balloon that appears to him through a skylight in the film’s concluding scene. For the balloon’s continued presence, he must have Song to thank; she delivered an element of magic that Suzanne was unequipped to provide. It’s a wonder that Suzanne surely understands–she seems like the type to remember what it felt like to be a child–even if she’s at an age where she knows a bit too much about how the world works to share in that wonder. Flight of the Red Balloon is a little bit happy and a little bit sad, a high-angle view on childhood in the sunlight and adulthood in the shadows, with the much-longed-for consummation of the heart’s yearnings floating on the breeze just out of reach.

A highlight at the 2007 Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals, FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON is the latest masterpiece from Hou Hsiao Hsien (CAFE, LUMIERE, THREE TIMES). Inspired by Albert Lamorisse*s 1956 Academy Award Winning classic, THE RED BALLOON, Hou expands on its key elements-a young boy, a red balloon and Paris- to weave an achingly beautiful tale on the mysteries of familial bonds and the lingering effects the past has on us all. A precious young boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu) must deal with the increasing fragility of his mother, the loving yet preoccupied Suzanne (Academy

Award Winner Juliette Binoche of THE ENGLISH PATIENT, CACHE). Completely immersed in her own tribulations, Suzanne hires Song (Song Fan), a Taiwanese film student, to help care for Simon. Together with Song, a unique extended family is formed, utterly interdependent yet lost in separate thoughts and dreams mirrored by a delicate, shiny red balloon.

1.65GB | 1h 55m | 1024×560 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/342F3C578F4B6CB/Flight.of.the.Red.Balloon.2007.576.Bluray.x264-SMz.mkv

Language(s):French,Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Hsiao-hsien Hou – Le voyage du ballon rouge AKA Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.