Tsai Ming-Liang, a longtime rebel

Tsai Ming-liang loves cinema too much to limit himself to what is expected of him in the industry: script, actors, filming and always money. Over the last ten years, the most sensational director of Taiwan’s new wave, born in 1957 and originally from Malaysia, has reinvented himself. He made a series of films with hypnotic devices that were collected in the same series, walker, Nine short films and feature films, shot at festivals and art centers according to invitations.

Lee Kang-sheng, a favorite actor Tsai Ming-liang has photographed for thirty years, wanders there like a Buddhist monk, red and shaved head, walking extremely slowly through the city (Hong Kong, Tokyo, Venice, Paris, etc.). You never know what this superhero looks like slow In the middle of the crowd and the filmmaker – a practicing Buddhist – creates a slow anxiety.

TV series Walker Broadcast at the Center Pompidou in Paris, where a retrospective of the Taiwanese’s work is taking place: the audience will be able to (re)discover his films made for television, from the late 1980s, his feature film. Films steeped in the real life of Taipei (shiny shopping malls, arid climate, lonely souls in search of love and their sexuality), where the filmmaker revealed his ecstatic burlesque art, his hero in a neck grab. Lee Kang-sheng. Quote Rebels of the Neon God (1992), long live love (1994), The Golden Lion in Venice, river (1997), And what time is it there? (2001), Watermelon flavor (2005), Stray dogs (2014)…

Buddhist Sutras

On Wednesday, November 30, his new feature film, days, a pure visual wonder without dialogue, where two actors trapped in their everyday lives find themselves in the ecstasy of a hotel room – one of the strongest films of Berlinale 2020. In addition to Lee Kang-sheng, the filmmaker is making a new film. Actor, Laotian Anong Hunhuangs, whom he met in Bangkok, Thailand, where he lived doing odd jobs. From now on, young Tsai works together with Min-Liang on the creation of the museum. Everyone calls him Anong.

Here he is exactly on Level – 1 of Beaubourg, Monday, November 21st, a slight silhouette in black jeans, sitting in front of a huge white sheet. Anong uses lines of Buddhist sutras to be copied (rule in the form of aphorisms) in Lao characters, all in the round, echoing Tsai Ming-liang’s side-by-side sutras written in Chinese. Everything is done in an inexhaustible coal mine, there is no room for error. ” Heart Sutra and The Diamond Sutra These are the two Buddhist texts that I like the most and that I recite to myself daily. It gives me a quiet strength and allows me to move forward.”explains the filmmaker, a few steps before the installation. “These texts are also a kind of prayer in view of the threats against peace and democracyshe said. As for the tension between Taiwan and China, they speak of a global problem between freedom-loving people and authoritarian rule. »