Kang-sheng Lee

A seemingly ordinary night shifts dramatically when a group of high school students, celebrating a birthday, stumble upon a hidden, luxurious manor. The palace holds secrets and a strange allure, but as the hours tick by, the celebratory mood turns to unease, leading them down a path of surreal discoveries and confronting the true cost of perfection.

A man obsessively searches for his missing daughter after receiving disturbing videos exposing his secrets, leading to a chilling confrontation with the voyeur. (imdb)

A monk in red robe passes through rural and urban landscapes. His journey brings uncertainty when a stranger seems to follow his path. Lee Kang-Sheng stars in this Walker series film. (imdb)

Yu returns home after 10 years in prison.

Kang lives alone in a big house, Non in a small apartment in town. They meet, and then part, their days flowing on as before. (imdb)

Jia-min, who was born sensitive to the paranormal, tries to summon "Yi-A-Gu" with two streamers. Huo-ge helps Jia-min subdue the spirit when the situation goes out of hand. Huo-ge possesses supernatural powers but lost his will to exorcise demons during a battle with the Thai Demon five years ago. As the wave of suicides continues, the village is thrown into chaos. Another battle is about to begin.. (imdb)

A visual allegory where the percussion recalls the symbolism of the drum which also summarizes the feminine dimension of man, therefore, mothers and daughters - women of every race and religion such as rivers, ponds, lakes and streams, all have names different but all contain "water rituals" the perpetuation of the woman dimension, an indispensable source as a representation of purity and splendor in the beats of time for the perpetuation of life.

Radically rethinking the tired talking-heads template, Tsai Ming-liang's latest digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue. Comprised of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals (Tsai devotees will no doubt recognize his long-time muse, Lee Kang-sheng), the film shrewdly deemphasizes language while reducing context to a bare minimum. In their place, the beauty and imperfections of each face take center stage. (NYFF)

Continuing his Walker series, Tsai once again captures the slow walking Lee Kang-sheng with 16 long-shots at Taiwan's Zhuangwei Sand-Dune Visitor Service Park, as a part of the exhibition curated by Tsai. (imdb)

The Deserted, a film by Tsai, Ming-Liang. The artisan of cinematography approaches virtual reality, pushing the boundaries of VR film. A film produced by tech pioneer HTC Virtual Reality Content Centre, and co-produced with Jaunt China. The 55-minute long film's title in its original Chinese means "the Home of Lan Re Temple" and is a short ghost story stripped from a longer novel (imdb)

A sadisitic landlord manipulates the lives of his tenants through a network of surveillance cameras installed throughout the building. A loafer inherits an apartment block and lets out the place to a group of tenants, including a lusty gymnastics teacher, a geeky college student, a single father with his young daughter, a gay couple, a writer and a sexy female office worker. An incredible story is about to unfold as they start their lives in the same building. (imdb)

This disarmingly candid, insightful and ultimately very touching conversation between Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang and his muse Lee Kang-sheng illuminates one of the great actor-director collaborations in cinema history. (TIFF)

A Japanese porno actor, HIV positive, commits suicide. Natsumi, a popular porno actress who has often worked with him, learns that she is also HIV positive and becomes desperate. She receives mysterious post cards at times from Taiwan, and decides to go to Taiwan to solve the mystery. (imdb)

Tsai's "walker" returns, this time in Tokyo.

This is the festival trailer for Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival 2015. The trailer will be shown in over 100 cinemas in Austria and Germany and during the festival in several cinemas in Vienna. (imdb)

The face of an exhausted man breathing deeply, his face agitated and, nearby, the sea. A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille - so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town's goings-on. (berlinale.de)

An impoverished, alcoholic father and his two young children struggle to survive on the fringes of modern Taipei. Eking out a meager living while sheltering in abandoned, waterlogged structures, the family spends their days navigating urban isolation and decay. Their bleak, repetitive routine takes a turn when they cross paths with a compassionate supermarket clerk.

A monk walks all over the streets of Hong Kong. Very slowly.

The title of the François Lunel film is the Buddhist proverb concluding by: "all is but illusion". His movie draws the Tsai Ming-Liang's face during the shooting of his movie Visage, which --itself-- is also a movie within a movie. (imdb)

Hsiao-Kang, a Taiwanese film director, travels to the Louvre in Paris, France, to shoot a film that explores the Salomé myth. (imdb)

Ah Jie lost everything in the stock market due to a severe economic crisis. He spends his days in his sealed apartment, smoking joints and looking after the marijuana plants that he secretly grows in his wardrobe. In desperation, he calls a suicide helpline and gets to know Chyi, whose sweet and gentle voice causes him to fall in love with his fantasized image of her... (imdb)

Hsaio-Kang (Kang-sheng Lee) is beaten up by street hustlers and is carried back to a abandoned half-completed building, home to the homeless and downtrodden, by a group of Bangladeshi men. There he is meticulously, even lovingly, brought back to health by Rawang (Norman Bin Atun), where they share a salvaged, stained flea-ridden mattress... (IMDB Comments)

Hsiao-Kang, now working as an adult movie actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.

On a rainy night in Taipei, a historic cinema screens King Hu’s 1967 classic "Dragon Inn" for one final time before closing its doors forever. As the film plays, the lives of the theater’s few remaining patrons and staff intersect in the shadows. It is a haunting, minimalist tribute to the vanishing era of traditional moviegoing, filled with longing, silence, and cinematic ghosts.

Documentary about Ming-liang Tsai

A girl (Shiang-chyi Chen) looks for a street vendor in Taipei. But she can't find him since the Skywalk is Gone. (imdb)

When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a girl on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches Francois Truffaut's Les 400 Coups, she has a strange encounter with its now-ageing star (Jean-Pierre Leaud). (imdb)

Award-winning political drama from Ann Hui treads on rich territory and results in a noble, but emotionally lacking effort. Using the work of real-life activist Father Franco Mella (played here by Anthony Wong) as a guideline, Ordinary Heroes moves from the plight of the boat people through the tragedy at Tiananmen Square with a sweeping view of political activism in Hong Kong. (lovehkfilm)

As a strange epidemic spreads and non-stop rain floods a decaying Taipei apartment complex, a plumber drills a hole between two units. Through this opening, an isolated man and the woman living below him slowly form an understated connection while resisting government evacuation orders.

It's a story about love, desire - Taboo love between a sister and a brother. (imdb)

This metaphysical meditation on the anomie of modern urban life focuses on the problems of a family in Taipei. (KimStim)

Historical drama about a man coping with the tragic death of his young wife. As he makes new connections, he works to be a better man and father.

Three lonely strangers in Taipei—a real estate agent, a street vendor, and a funeral home worker—unknowingly share an unsold luxury apartment. As their paths secretly intersect within the vacant space, each searches for intimacy, connection, and solace amidst the emotional isolation of modern urban life.

Hsiao-kang, a lonely student in Taipei, drops out of his prep school and becomes obsessed with Ah-tze, a small-time criminal who damaged his father's taxi. As he secretly stalks Ah-tze through the neon-lit gaming arcades and urban streets of the city, their alienated lives drift into vandalism, petty crime, and emotional detachment amid a changing Taiwan.

A man blackmails a boy for his lunch money.

The film follows a lower working class family of scalpers, a mother, father, son, daughter, and senile grandfather. The daughter gets in with the wrong crowd, a pimp, and tries to challenge her parents' authority by courting the pimp's advances. When a trip to the motel turns sexually aggressive she breaks a bottle and stabs him in the chest. The family is shattered that their daughter is embroiled in such an affair, so blind are they to their own delinquent behaviour serving as a bad role model (Donato Totaro)