Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou Hsiao-hsien (born April 8, 1947, Meixian [now Meizhou], Guangdong province, China) is a Chinese-born Taiwanese director known for his film explorations of Taiwan’s history and family life, which emphasized realism through their subject matter and measured pace.

Hou was born in mainland China, but his family fled the Chinese Civil War (1945–49) and settled in Taiwan, where he spent his childhood. He fulfilled his mandatory two years’ military service prior to studying film at the National Taiwan Arts Academy. Following his graduation in 1972, Hou worked for a time as a salesman, until he began making inroads as a screenwriter and assistant director in the mid-1970s.

Hou made his debut as a director of feature-length films in 1980 with Jiushi liuliu de ta (“Cute Girl”), a melodrama that bore little resemblance to the films he would make as his personal style developed. The segment Hou directed for the anthology film Er zi de da wan ou (1983; “The Sandwich Man”) displayed the first flowering of his aesthetic, employing the deliberate pacing and impressionistic visuals for which he would become known. Over time he built a reputation for the challenging, episodic style of his narratives, and he became identified with the use of wide master shots of characters engaged in mundane, often wordless actions that spoke to their situations more effectively than dialogue could.

Directed and cowritten by Hou, the semiautobiographical film Tongnian wangshi (1985; A Time to Live, a Time to Die) is the coming-of-age story of a young man raised in Taiwan under circumstances similar to Hou’s own. Hou also found his true voice in making films set against the backdrop of Taiwanese history, such as Lianlian fengchen (1986; Dust in the Wind) and Beiqing chengshi (1989; A City of Sadness). The latter film detailed the February 28, 1947, massacre by mainland Chinese of local Taiwanese demonstrating in the city of Taipei. The subject remained taboo in China for decades after the massacre, and A City of Sadness was the first film to address it.

Despite his many successful movies and the critical acclaim he received in his native Taiwan, Hou was relatively unknown to Western audiences before the release of his 2007 French film, Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon). Set in Paris, it tells the story of a Chinese student who tends to the son of a distracted artist, a single mother played by Juliette Binoche. The red balloon that appears throughout the movie becomes a metaphor for a family that is isolated and drifting, seemingly aimlessly, through life. The film is based in part on the popular French short film Le Ballon rouge (1956; The Red Balloon). Hou’s later movies included Nie Yinniang (2015; The Assassin), for which he was named best director at the Cannes film festival.