Hou Hsiao-hsien in the 21st Century

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"Spending his formative years in Taipei, a distinctly modern city that had swiftly grown into a metropolis in the years following the Chinese Civil War, Hou Hsiao-Hsien has always been principally an urban filmmaker, his view of the life in the concrete jungle perhaps summed up best in the title of one of his breakthrough movies: City of Sadness. As the city has changed, Hou the artist has changed with it, producing at the turn of the century one of his most radical departures, Millennium Mambo, a film that found the director searching for the digital pulse of the burgeoning era with a new freewheeling style. This daring film will play along with a trio of 21st century Hou titles, movies in which the alienation and exhilaration of life in the anonymous contemporary cityscape is distilled into unforgettable images as only this poet of urban anomie's work can."—Metrograph