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 Françaisein Paris.

Filmography

★★★★

'The lengthy final two shots...rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done'

Keith Uhlich, Time Out

★★★★★

'This, its director's apparent swansong, is a top to bottom swell of indelible mystery, misery, beauty and more.'

Michael Pattison, Grolsch Canvas

Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

‘This film’s poetry goes straight to the heart and solar plexus.’

Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

★★★★★

"Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery, every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip"

‘Tsai may well be cinema’s foremost connoisseur of defeat: the best chronicler we have of the temps mort between social reality and darkly comic dreams of despair.’

Tony Rayns, Film Comment

‘masterpiece’

‘Venice gets its first bona fide masterpiece in the latest film from Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang… Though Stray Dogs boasts that rare quality of being unlike anything else out there, the film it bares closest comparison to is Andrei Tarkovsky'sStalker… Every shot in this film instantly etches itself on the memory, but you'll have to find a special place for the last three which are some of the most extraordinary ever committed to film.’

David Jenkins, Little White Lies

‘exquisite 56-minute gem’

Ronnie Scheib, Variety

‘Tsai Ming-Liang’s ravishing conceptual film achieves a rare blend of sensuous delight and documentary specificity’.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

For film bookings please contact Colin Burch at Verve Pictures — [email protected]. Press resources are on the Press page.