Tsai Ming-liang in Person

August 14–31, 2025

BAMPFA welcomes director Tsai Ming-liang and actor Lee Kang-sheng to discuss seven of their films, including Vive l’amour; The Hole; Goodbye, Dragon Inn; What Time Is It There?; and Stray Dogs.

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  • Tsai Ming-liang: Days (2020)

  • Tsai Ming-liang: Rebels of the Neon God (1992)

  • Tsai Ming-liang: The Hole (1998)

  • Tsai Ming-liang: Goodbye, Dragon Inn (1967)

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Upcoming Films

  • Dragon Inn

    King Hu
    Taiwan, 1967

    4K Digital Restoration

    Thursday, August 14 7 PM

    King Hu’s legendary Dragon Inn merges swordplay, melodrama, history, and Beijing Opera traditions with thrilling results. Viewed obliquely in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, it suggests the transient pleasures of cinephilia.

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  • Rebels of the Neon God

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, 1992
    Friday, August 22 7 PM
    Introduced by Andrew F. Jones

    A disaffected youth and his friends wander through a neon Taipei in Tsai Ming-liang’s first feature, “a near-masterpiece” (Chicago Reader). “Inaugurates the filmmaker’s multi-movie study of urban alienation not with showoff chops but quiet, enduring compassion” (Village Voice).

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  • Vive l’amour

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, 1994
    Wednesday, August 27 7 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, and Andrew F. Jones in Conversation

    Three lost souls—and a very alluring empty apartment—form an unlikely love quadrangle in Tsai Ming-liang’s Venice-winning follow-up to Rebels of the Neon God. Here “Tsai began to emerge as one of our great poets of modern alienation” (Slant).

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  • The Hole

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, France, 1998
    Thursday, August 28 7 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, and Weihong Bao in Conversation

    In Taipei it’s the end of the world as we know it, thanks to a mysterious plague, but even the most alienated urbanite is dreaming of 1950s movie musicals in Tsai Ming-liang’s delirious exploration of modern isolation, quarantines, and dance numbers.

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  • What Time Is It There?

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, France, 2001

    35mm Archival Print

    Friday, August 29 7 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, and Pheng Cheah in Conversation

    A Taipei street vendor sets every clock to French time after meeting a young woman on her way to Paris in this endearing examination of loneliness, mourning, and time’s passage. “A film of surprise and wonder” (Rolling Stone).

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  • Goodbye, Dragon Inn

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, 2003
    Saturday, August 30 4 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, and Pheng Cheah in Conversation

    A crumbling old movie theater may be screening a martial arts film on-screen, but off-screen its patrons dream of other things in Tsai Ming-liang’s “weird, funny, melancholy tribute to movies and movie-going” (Chicago Tribune).

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  • Stray Dogs

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, France, 2013
    Saturday, August 30 7 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, and Iggy Cortez in Conversation

    An alcoholic single father and his two children flit through the margins of contemporary Taipei in Tsai Ming-liang’s remarkable work of social critique, long-take experimentalism, and asphalt surrealism, in which “every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip” (The Telegraph).

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  • Sand

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, 2018
    Sunday, August 31 3 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, and Leeroy K. Y. Kang in Conversation

    Red-robed and barefoot, the actor Lee Kang-sheng walks along the black sand beaches and among the concrete structures of the Zhuangwei Dune Visitor Service Park on Taiwan’s northeastern coast.

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  • Days

    Tsai Ming-liang
    Taiwan, 2020
    Sunday, August 31 6 PM
    Tsai Ming-liang, Lee Kang-sheng, Anong Houngheuangsy, and Iggy Cortez in Conversation

    Two men separated by age and nationality—a middle-aged Taiwanese with a bad neck and a younger Lao immigrant in Thailand—go about their daily lives in this “ravishing, wordless story of urban loneliness” (Screen Daily).

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Past Films