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A sleeping city, streets without people. A figure in a red robe walks slowly — across a carpet of leaves, over cobblestones, along the cold pavement. Autumn night fog descends upon the city. In the cinema, people watch the monk’s slow steps and fall asleep. Can phantoms meet and understand each other? Night Journey was created in just ten days through a collaboration between Tsai Ming-liang and FAMU students — a tribute to cinema and to Jihlava as a place of silent dreaming.

In Taipei’s dreamscape, Tao’s incomprehensible love for Shin drives her to create painful memories. Meanwhile, Melih, burdened with self-blame, longs to connect with the perpetually drunk Ping.

In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.

In 2013, the Golden Horse Film Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. The ministry of Culture commissioned director Yang Li-chou to make a documentary about the history of Golden Horse. What is unique to this film is that it's not an ode to celebrities but about the role cinema plays in ordinary people's lives. It's a love letter to cinema, filmmakers and audiences.

In 2015, Tsai Ming-Liang was once again invited by the Hong Kong International Film Festival to make the opening short film. This time, he selected Shibuya station in Tokyo as his main filming location and invited the famous Japanese actor Masanobu Ando to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng. They sleep separately at a capsule hotel and cleanse themselves at a public bath. Their fatigued bodies yearn for sleep but restless minds keep them for falling asleep. "No No Sleep" won the Best Director Award at the Taipei Film Festival.

Over an extended period, a director engages in an ongoing conversation with Yu, a teenage girl trying to come out of her experience of sexual trauma. A dialogue built on trust, the film follows Yu as she gradually learns to assert herself while the director remains present and open in the process. Through her social encounters, her words, and the short films she makes, Yu reflects on how she has been seen and defined, and begins to reclaim control of her own story. Resisting the label of “victim,” she moves forward with a firm step into the world.

In the 1970s, Taiwan's first grand cabaret, The Sapphire, opened in Kaohsiung, igniting a golden decade of live entertainment. Beneath its dazzling lights, the nation's tensions and censorship faded in nights of glitz and song.Stars like Teresa Teng, Fei Yu-ching and Fong Fei-fei graced. its stage, where glamour met gambling, drugs, and danger.Half a century later, The Sapphire is resurrected—through AI and music—to relive its untamed brilliance.

Although the Chinese government promised that Hong Kong would retain separate status until 2047, in recent years the Chinese state has consolidated its power over the metropolis. Large-scale protests by the populace have been brutally suppressed. This mix of documentary, fiction, and visions of the future reveals the current state of desolate depression among the people of Hong Kong. “A desperate attempt to capture the final moments of a sinking island”, as maker Chan Tze-woon himself puts it.

On a small island, the indigenous Da’o people live in harmony with the Pacific. Their love for the sea prompts 19-year-old Vongnyan to enlist in the navy. Returning broken, he confides his traumas to the waves during bouts of insomnia. His younger brother, Bo, plays and lives in the water, completely carefree, yet he, too, will soon have to choose his future.

The rural Taiwanese outer islands of Kinmen sit merely 2 miles off the coast of China. Kinmen attracts tourists for its remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War. It also marks the frontline for Taiwan in its escalating tension with China.

Lush jungle and a building in ruins are the ideal stage for a film-confession that defies storytelling and goes beyond conversation on cinema. Tsai Ming-Liang and his actor Lee Kang-sheng confess and put on stage a pièce in which attention and slowness are in tune with the rhythm of memory. The unveiling of Tsai Ming-liang’s filmmaking: from Stray Dogs to the most intimate notes of the director-actor relationship.

It has been eight years since Typhoon Morakot, the deadliest typhoon to impact Taiwan in recorded history, swept through Siaolin Village. It left 462 inhabitants dead, including Mr WENG Jui-chi's beloved family. Like the other 46 survivors, WENG struggled to face the recurrent nightmare after losing his family, tackling the regret and guilt of being left alone.

The walker with the shaved head and dressed in a red robe is barefoot. He walks slowly but determinedly through the forest, over stones and grassland. He also makes his way through the shadows of trees and houses. He sets foot in the train station, the church and the museum. The sun rises and sets again. The walker passes through Washington, D.C. Another stranger is also on the move in the city. We are unsure whether or not he is following the walker.

Jackie Chan and Arthur Huang are on a mission to test the Trashpresso, the world's first fully mobile plastics recycling machine, in the harshest environment of the Tibetan Plateau.

In a city of endless deliveries, two thirty-year-old riders, one weighed down by debt and the other driven by hope, cling to a quiet yet enduring friendship as they dream of escaping a life caught in constant motion.

In 2016, Taiwan's film and television industry was in a recession. This made life even more difficult for the lowest-level performers, the extras. The story begins with Kehan Zhang, a man who loves acting and works as a full-time extra. He had been working as an extra for three years and paid NTD 500 in cash every time. His daily routine includes searching for various audition opportunities, submitting resumes, and only receiving audition notices every now and then. To fulfill the dream of becoming a leading actor, he decided to venture into the film and television industry in China and started his Don Quixote journey with pals. The documentary also films other actors and actresses - the girl from the south and Brother Long, and how they experienced gender and age limitations in the industry. Besides the stereotypes in the industry, they also faced challenges balancing work and family.

With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.

A young photographer wanders through the city as Taiwan is preparing for the presidential election. Constantly questioning his talent as an artist, he suffers from the uncertainty facing his future as he is about to turn 30 - a watershed age in one's life according to traditional Taiwanese culture. His accidental encounter with an ex-girlfriend propels him to reconsider his past, present and future in the river of time.

Follows the lives of two big stars in Taiwan. Since a failed spine surgery 40 years ago, Lee Pei-jing, known as the “Moon singer”, has been confined to a wheelchair. Actor Chang Feng is reaching one hundred years old. Tsai describes Chang as a tree, which looks ever more beautiful as it grows old.

A dying forest flared up and the flavor of damp ruin, settled in on the tongue: Tsai Ming Liang created an entirely novel artwork with his tenth feature film 'Stray Dogs' at the Museum MoNTUE. Moving images eclipsed, in slivers and swathes, by immovable shadows of deadwood. Waking, sleep and everything in between proved indistinguishable. This documentary recreates elements of existential banality (on view) and guides focus inward. It establishes a firm, if converse, analog between cinema and consciousness: an interplay of movie (and its constituent elements of light, shadow and audience) mirrored in consciousness (and its building blocks of waking, sleep and dream) if you will.

The film sketches the lives and tribulations of some of those kids the college girl on summer break, the boys from the neighbouring province who only want to do hip-hop and through them we get a real glimpse of what makes Shanghai today a promising big city.

During the turmoil of 2019 Hong Kong, before pursuing his studies in Taiwan, the director was abruptly frozen in the present by a message from his father. As Hong Kong entered a pandemic lockdown, the director, now in Taiwan, began to Skype call his father, unpacking his traumatic memories and their entangled hearts.

Tsai interrupted his pre-production for The River to make this pioneering documentary for Taiwan's nascent AIDS-awareness campaign. Ignoring instructions to 'play down the gay angle', he centres the film on his own very candid conversations with two HIV+ young men. Sadly the identities of the interviewees have to be concealed, and so the freewheeling camerawork focuses most often on Tsai himself; but the sense of rapport between the director and his 'new friends' is palpable and very moving, even to Western viewers already only too familiar with these issues.

This is a touching documentary film about some elderly people who suffer from dementia, and their families.

In 2011, Tsai Ming-Liang staged a play, "Only You", for Taiwan's National Theater and Concert Hall. In it, there was a powerfully moving scene where monk Xuanzang walked at an extremely slow pace for half an hour. Lamenting the transient nature of theater, Tsai decided to make a movie out of this slow-walking performance, "No Form", the first of his "Walker Films" series.

It seems quite outdated to talk about left-wingism and socialism in today's Taiwan. But through the story of Shi, we learn what classism, Marxism and White Terror had meant on the island. Aged 83 now, Shi recalls how his friends were arrested and killed by the government in 1946 simply because they had a different political belief...

In 2012, Taiwanese architects Michael Lin and Liao Wei-li invited Tsai Ming-Liang to create moving visuals for their exhibit at the Venise Architecture Biennale. Using the space at their preview exhibition in Taiwan, Tsai Ming-Liang made two short films, "Sleepwalk" and "Diamond Sutra", using the "Walker" concept. "Diamond Sutra" was later selected to be the opening short film for the Venise Film Festival. Tsai-Ming Liang said that gazing at the steam rising from a rice cooker reminded him of his mother's face as she laid dying, exhaling her final breath.

The life of the epoch-making master of martial arts cinema, King Hu.

Young Taiwanese worker Lin spends his days crafting intricate paper houses for funeral offerings. When his boss arranges a blind date for him, he begins to envision his future through the burning paper houses. What does an ideal life look like?

The original subject intended for this film was a spiritual medium who was unbelievably accurate. Tsai Ming-liang jumped on his 50cc motorbike, equipped with a DV camera ready to shoot her, to see whether the god would speak to his camera. But on the way, he was caught in a traffic jam of people gathered at another god’s festival. A man in a trance, flashy karaoke girls on stage, a power black-out. During his diversion, the camera discovers fish and underground passages

The ninth opus of his Walker Films series, which was shot at Centre Pompidou.

Seven years. Eight married couples. They are open and honest, reflecting on why they married each other in the first place, why they have lost the passion, and why they are tired of the other person's problems with the mother-in-law; they talk about sex, having children, and the fact that they can't stand each other any longer...

Tsai Ming-liang's new film, Back Home, depicts Anong Houngheuangsy and the daily life of his home village in Laos. We witness buildings in varying states of habitation and disrepair, farm animals, rice fields, religious sites, domestic scenes, a sun-dappled food market, and a dog adorably trying (and failing) to escape a carnival ride.

During World War II, Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire. This documentary explores the experiences of Taiwanese soldiers, doctors, and overseas residents in Southeast Asia during that time. Using cross-generational memory dialogues, family letters, diaries, and videos, the film addresses the complexities of Taiwan's historical memory and diverse identities during that period.

Focusing on Mark Lee Ping-bin, one of the most talented and prolific cinematographers in Asia, the movie details the itinerant lifestyle of a deeply observant and philosophical artist and the tolls that his profession takes on his family life.

Composed of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals, filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang's digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue.

A short experimental documentary directed by Chang Chao-Tang (張照堂) during his tenure at the China Television Company (中國電視公司) for the program News Highlights (新聞集錦). Using an abstract visual approach, Chang captures the printmaker Liao Shiou-Ping (廖修平) in his thirties, at the height of his creative vigor. The film is entirely without narration and is accompanied by composer Chou Wen-Chung’s (周文中) modernist piece "Cursive" (草書).

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of WWII, this documentary film describes the eight years of dauntless air-force fighting of the republic of China during the Anti-Japanese War, with only 300 combat-capable aircraft from China while Japan had over 2000.

An in-depth documentary on the reclusive Taiwanese artist Huang Hua-Cheng and his avant-garde legacy. Commissioned by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the retrospective exhibition: “An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng” (2020).

“What were you doing last year, when I took this photo from a train passing by your house?”

On the outskirts of Taipei, there is a leprosy sanatorium built by the Japanese occupiers in 1930 to seclude thousands of patients and maintain sanitary conditions on the land. For the last two decades, Taiwanese authorities have decided to turn the sanatorium into a museum to commemorate the history of leprosy medicine. However, the sanatorium has slowly been destroyed due to constant construction that has overwhelmed the remaining aged patients. To cope with this struggle, they protest and build landscape models with their gnarled hands representing their accurate memories and experiences. They continue to fight against the authorities’ efforts to erase the history of segregation and discrimination and have not given up.

A teacher Chen Yixing, with a group of elementary school students outdoors, was attacked by hornets. In order to save the emergency, Teacher Chen took off his coat, covered the hive, and screamed for everyone to run, and finally martyred.

Benjamin, who lives alone in Taiwan, has not returned to Hong Kong for two years due to the epidemic. Day after day boring and hard days, video chatting with his only relatives sister has become an important spiritual companion during this extraordinary period. Missing spread after a phone call..

Brash and opinionated, Christine Choy is a documentarian, cinematographer, professor, and quintessential New Yorker whose films and teaching have influenced a generation of artists. In 1989 she started to film the leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests who escaped to political exile following the June 4 massacre. Though Choy never finished that project, she now travels with the old footage to Taiwan, Maryland, and Paris in order to share it with the dissidents who have never been able to return home.

Something is wrong with the “soil”, rendering farmers unable to make money. Enthusiastic middle-aged farmer A-Ren switches to the tech industry, aiming to revive the soil by turning garbage into compost, with his family reluctantly supporting his dream. Meanwhile, An-he, who is nearing retirement, leads his family to cultivate the land using organic farming methods. Farming becomes not only a way of life but also an attitude towards life. As the cycles of nature unfold between the tug-of-war of ideals versus reality, two farmers — one old, one young; one calm, one energetic — will intersect amid the changing seasons of life.

A continuation of Tsai Ming-Liang's Walker series, featuring Lee Kang-Sheng as a barefoot monk who walks very slowly.

During the soft lockdown, many people once again got back in touch with their lives: a girl shot videos everyday to share with the woman who was to be her mother, a father who finally has time for his cat, a teenager who has to graduate through videoconferencing, an individual quarantining alone at home, and a director whose new film was put on hold. Everyone grows and adapts to the new normal, and subsequently bids farewell to their old life.

Daughter of Nectar, a gracefully carved marble nude from 1921 by Huang Tu-shui, Taiwan's inaugural modern sculptor, encapsulates a complex century of Taiwanese history, spanning from Japanese colonisation to Chiang Kai-shek's authoritarian rule and the White Terror era. This sculpture, both delicate and resilient, stands as a silent sentinel, mirroring the enduring struggles, suppressed voices, and profound cultural transformations of its homeland.

One rainy afternoon, the sound of a vendor calling out "Fix your screen windows, screen doors - Install new glass!" summoned this daydream. I traveled with the repairman to Toad Mountain in search of the maiden he so vividly described. But the houses here had long crumbled into ruin.

Each bookstore forms its own poetic landscape: gentle hands restoring old books, a bookstore owner guiding customers on herbal hikes, an eco-activist protecting mountains through reading, and a woman from a fishing community preserving local memories. Director Hou Chi-jan captures these intimate narratives through lyrical imagery, portraying 15 independent Taiwanese bookstores and preserving fading stories and quiet cultural resilience.