The Taiwanese director whose work across forty-five years has, by general international critical consensus, established him as one of the most-significant working filmmakers of his generation.
Hou Hsiao-hsien began directing in 1980, in Taiwan, working within the Taiwanese New Wave that emerged at the end of the 1970s. He has directed roughly twenty features across the subsequent forty-five years. His major works include A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), A City of Sadness (1989, Golden Lion at Venice), The Puppetmaster (1993), Good Men, Good Women (1995), Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Flowers of Shanghai (1998), Millennium Mambo (2001), Three Times (2005), and The Assassin (2015, Best Director at Cannes).
His commercial reach has been modest — his films have, with rare exceptions, grossed under $5m worldwide. His critical reputation among working international filmmakers is, however, extremely high. He has been cited as a foundational influence by Wong Kar-wai, Bong Joon-ho, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and many others. His specific approach — slow-pace long takes, the framing of historical material through individual family experience, the refusal of conventional dramatic mechanics — has shaped subsequent international art-cinema in ways that exceed his commercial footprint.
He announced his retirement from filmmaking in 2023, citing health considerations including a dementia diagnosis. The retirement effectively closes one of the most-significant working filmographies in contemporary international cinema.
Hou's working approach is built on long takes. His films routinely include single shots that run several minutes. Camera movement is minimal; the framing is typically static or slow-pan. The action plays out within the frame across extended duration. The audience is required to inhabit the temporal experience of the characters rather than receiving compressed cinematic time.
The technique has been imitated extensively across subsequent international art cinema. Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong work, Kore-eda's family dramas — all show Hou influence at the level of pacing and camera approach. Hou's specific gift is that the slow pace is, in his films, not merely formal preference but structural substance. The audience is asked to attend to the small details of physical space and human comportment that conventional fast-cutting cinema does not permit.
Hou's most-significant works are interested in 20th-century Taiwanese and Chinese history rendered through specific family experience rather than through political-historical framing. A City of Sadness (1989) is about the 228 Incident — the 1947 violent suppression of Taiwanese resistance to Kuomintang rule — told through one extended Taiwanese family across several years. The Puppetmaster (1993) is about the life of Li Tien-lu, a Taiwanese puppeteer whose career spanned Japanese colonial rule, the Kuomintang transition, and the post-war period.
The technique avoids the conventional historical-epic approach (the political-leader-centred framing, the major-event-as-dramatic-climax structure) in favour of an oblique approach in which the historical material is visible primarily through its effects on individual family decisions. The audience is asked to read the broader history through the small choices the families make. The approach has been influential across subsequent international art cinema dealing with historical material.
Hou's films are, in some sense, the foundational text of the contemporary international contemplative tradition. The slow-pace observational approach that defines the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, Hong Sang-soo, Jia Zhangke, and other contemporary art-cinema directors is, structurally, downstream of Hou's working method. The 'slow cinema' label that has been applied to this body of work was, in some sense, coined to describe what Hou was already doing in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
What separates Hou from many subsequent slow-cinema practitioners is the warmth of his observational register. The films are not, in temperament, cold. The slow pace is not an arms-length distancing device; it is, instead, an attempt to honour the actual texture of how human relationships develop in real time. The films are, on close inspection, deeply affectionate toward their subjects. The affection is the structural foundation of the work.
If you've never watched a Hsiao-hsien film:
Yasujiro Ozu (Hou has explicitly cited as foundational), the Taiwanese literary tradition (particularly Huang Chun-ming), Italian neorealism, and the post-war Japanese cinema tradition broadly. Hou's Café Lumière (2003) is an explicit Ozu tribute commissioned for the centenary of Ozu's birth.