Tsai’s latest, like the director’s best works, revels in the unexpected, sublime textures of daily routine and understated tenderness. Those familiar with Tawainese auteur Tsai Ming-liang will know what to expect from his latest feature, Days, which won the Teddy Award at the 2020 Berlinale. With his…
We at InRO aren’t immune for fall festival fatigue, and that means we too frequently pass over small festivals that deserve the attention. This year we’re making an effort to mitigate that reality, and while we won’t be covering the San Diego Asian Film…
by InRO Staff Festival Coverage Film
London Film Festival 2020 — Dispatch 1: Films We’ve Already Covered
Another week, another festival. For this year’s BFI London Film Festival, it’s business as usual, which is to say the unusual business of 2020 film festivals. Like others before it, London will be employing a similar hybrid format, mixing socially-distanced physical screenings with a…
The fall festival season has looked far different this year, limited both in its ability to exhibit films and in the breadth of selection available. As a result, heading into the 58th New York Film Festival, InRO has already published pieces on roughly one-third…
There’s a willful naivete many cinephiles employ when attempting to wax poetics about “the theater-going experience,” one that blatantly ignores sociopolitical and economic dimensions in favor of embracing the notion that because one has the financial means to A). reside in a city that…
It has become increasingly evident that 2009 was a major turning point in Tsai Ming-liang’s artistic development: Madame Butterfly marked his first, decisive shift to digital, while Face, a commission of the Louvre Museum, inaugurated a significant turn towards gallery and installation work. In…
In considering the artistic decay posed within the persisting practice of archetypal expository documentary, Your Face represents a confrontation with history and convention, here mapped in the contours and minute expressions playing out across a variety of people. A selection of 12 faces interact…
Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng have one of the strangest relationships in movies. For dedicated Tsai (and Lee) fans, that goes almost without saying. From the beginning, this director’s camera has reserved for this actor’s body its tenderest embraces, its lustiest looks, its cruelest…
The Journey to the West was perhaps the defining story of Chinese language film in the 2010s. Like stories of the Shaolin Temple or folk hero Wong Fei-hung in previous decades, it inspired myriad adaptations and interpretations, from filmmakers with wildly different styles and…
Were one to walk the streets of Taipei, ride its elevated MRT lines, and pass by the imposing structure of the Taipei 101 and the malls that surround it, one would likely find — with just a modicum of effort — the rundown, low-level…
