Hou Hsiao-Hsien (born April 8, 1947 in Mei County, Guangdong, China) is a Taiwanese actor, singer, producer and director. He is a leading figure of Taiwan’s New Wave cinema movement. In a 1988 New York Film Festival World Critics Poll, was voted one of three directors who would most likely shape cinema in the coming decades. He has since become one of the most respected, influential directors working in cinema today. In spite of his international renown, his films have focused exclusively on his native Taiwan, offering finely textured human dramas that deal with the subtleties of family relationships against the backdrop of the island’s turbulent, often bloody history. All of his movies deal in some manner with questions of personal and national identity, particularly, “What does it mean to be Taiwanese?” In a country that has been colonized first by the Japanese and then by Chiang Kai-Shek’s repressive Nationalist Government, this question is pregnant with political connotations. Hou’s work centers on two recurring themes, the social upheaval and erosion of traditional family ties resulting from Taiwan’s rapid urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s and the representation of Taiwan as a multicultural, multilingual society, a view that intentionally differed from the government’s enforcement of Mandarin as the official tongue.
Films on Chinese Cinema :
Films that need to be added : Cute Girl, Cheerful Wind, The Green Green Grass of Home.
Chinese Cinema 