Last year, I had reported that master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien was gravely ill. A person I had spoken to believed we would never see another Hou film again due to his being diagnosed with early on-set dementia.
I only, mistakenly, got this news last year after inquiring about the 76-year-old Taiwanese auteur’s long-in-development film “Shulan River.” Location scouting had begun in 2022 and then the project went silent.
IndieWire has confirmed that the filmmaker is now retired, via film scholar Tony Rayns’ introduction to a screening of his 1985 film “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” at the Garden Cinema in London on October 23. This breaks my heart.
We hadn’t heard from Hou since his 2015 wuxia epic “The Assassin.” Then, very late in 2022, there was news that his long-developing drama “Shulan River” was finally beginning location scouting (via IONCINEMA).
Along with the late Edward Yang, I’ll always associate Hou as one of the guiding forces of the Taiwanese New Wave in the 1980s.
Hou’s best-known films include “A City of Sadness,” “Flowers of Shanghai,” and “The Puppetmaster.” His style is as arthouse as it gets, but there’s a real beauty to his images that just sucks you right into its frames.