Video & On Demand - Stray Dogs / Journey to the West DVD

• 

STRAY DOGS (Jiaoyou)

The latest film by visionary director Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye Dragon Inn) links together a series of sumptuously composed scenes that tell the story of a broken family living on the margins of Taipei society through tableau-like scenes, often without words. ‘Like Tsai's sublime I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Stray Dogs plucks its characters from society's margins; without sentimentalizing their subjects, these films exude empathy for day labourers and the homeless. As one mysterious, gorgeously composed scene gives way to the next, we come to know these characters, and something of their history, a time when they indeed had a home, a mother, a very different sort of life. We gaze into their past with them, are invited to share in their loss, and, gradually, imagine some brighter future.’ (Toronto Film Festival Catalogue)

Grand Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival, Wavelengths

 

JOURNEY TO THE WEST (Xi You)

Loosely based on the life of Xuanzang, a seventh-century Buddhist monk who trekked across Asia for 17 years in search of ‘the void’, Journey to the West provides, with its unusual, brilliantly chosen camera angles a collage of various districts in Marseille, creating a hypnotic space in which this meditative peregrination becomes a surprising journey of discovery.

Berlin Film Festival, Panorama Special
Tribeca Film Festival, Special Screening

 

The DVD box set also contains a unique sixty-nine minute Masterclass with Tsai-Ming-liang held at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.

Tsai Ming Liang Director

Filmography Selected

Tsai Ming-Liang was born in Malaysia in 1957. He is one of the most prominent film directors of the new cinema movement in Taiwan that started in the early 1990s, using the same actor, Lee Kang Sheng, in film after film. In 1994, his film Vive L'Amour was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. All his feature films have been been selected by either the Cannes, Berlin or Venice film festivals. In 2009, the Louvre Museum invited him to make the first fiction feature film for their collection “Le Louvre s'offre aux cineastes”: Face (Visage)  became a benchmark for filmmakers venturing into the art world. In 2012, the slow walking performance by Lee Kang Sheng, originally from a stage play, was developed into the “slow walking Long March” series of short films, which includes No Form, Walker, Sleepwalk and Diamond Sutra. These short films were made in different cities and across different fields, combining cinema, performance and installations to present an intellectual criticism of the endless pursuit of contemporary life. Stray Dogs and Journey to the West are his latest ventures into cinema.

Stray Dogs (2013)
Journey to the West (2013)
Face (2009)
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006)
The Wayward Cloud (2004)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)
The Skywalk Is Gone (2002)
What Time is it There? (2001)
The Hole (1998)
The River (1997)
Vive l'Amour (1994)
Rebels of the Neon God (1992)