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Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xsQfTkvBwg
“Our cities are changing all the time. It is as if we are living in a giant building site. I never avoid these places in my films. They remind us of what we are losing. They have an emotional appeal, as if they are characters themselves with their own stories to tell.” —Tsai Ming-liang
Coming after a four-year hiatus from filmmaking, Stray Dogs can be seen as further refinement of the observational, long-take style of Tsai Ming-liang’s previous films. It also serves as a bridge between his early work in experimental theater and his recent multimedia gallery installations. (In fact, at one point Stray Dogs was expanded into an immersive installation in a museum in Taipei.) The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, it features Lee Kang-sheng as a “sandwich man” who spends his days standing at busy intersections wearing advertising boards for luxury apartments that he could never hope to afford, and his nights caring for his two young children and drinking to alleviate his depression. Rejecting conventional cinematic narrative, Tsai tells the story through a succession of detailed, mesmerizing images that immerse us in their emotions and environment. Matt Zoller Seitz at Rogerebert.com called it “a mysterious and deliberately prolonged series of tableaus about the fragility of flesh and the smallness of humanity, among other things. . . . It asks us to set aside everything we've been conditioned to think movies are, and roll with a different way of seeing and hearing things, and connect.” (Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2013, 138 min., DCP, Mandarin with English subtitles)
Film still courtesy of The Cinema Guild |
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