Cinema Galerie : Millenium Mamboo

Cinema Galerie : Millenium Mamboo

11/08 @ 19h00

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Hou Hsiao-hsien might best be described as "a film-maker's film-maker". Other directors revere the Taiwanese auteur, even if his films rarely reach wide audiences. When Jim Jarmusch won the Cannes Grand Prix for Broken Flowers, he seemed almost embarrassed at landing such an award ahead of Hou, whom he called his "teacher". French film-maker Olivier Assayas admired Hou so much that in 1997, he made a feature length documentary about him: HHH: Portrait de Hou Hsiao-hsien. Critics are equally enthusiastic. "Hou may well be one of the greatest story-tellers the cinema has known, a rival to DW Griffith," Kent Jones wrote recently. Hou was voted "Director of the Decade (1990s)" in a poll of international film critics put together by the Village Voice and Film Comment. Nonetheless, not even winning a Golden Lion in Venice for his 1989 film City of Sadness has helped him emerge a long way outside the festival circuit.

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The Taiwanese director researches his projects meticulously. For his 2001 feature, Millennium Mambo, largely set in the hyper-charged twilight world of the Taipei rave scene, he threw himself into youth culture. The distinguished auteur hung out at the local discos and even experimented with ecstasy. He doesn't think it is a drug for his generation. "It relaxes you," he muses. "Young people have many, many pressures. When they take it, they can open their minds, relax and get rid of all these pressures. But I don't have these pressures."

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Millennium Mambo was part of his ongoing attempt to explore Taiwanese culture, history and politics. In his work, he has dealt frankly with moments in Taiwan's recent past the censors would rather he had left well alone. A City of Sadness was set in the late 1940s, a time of huge upheaval in the country, and made explicit reference to the 1947 massacre of unarmed demonstrators by Chaing Kai-Shek's Nationalist troops. The fact that the Tiananmen Squar