MILLENIUM MAMBO

Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Taiwan

- 2001

A young woman, Vicky, is torn between two men, Hao-hao and Jack. At night she works as the PR of a night club. Hao-hao watches over her all the time: he checks her charge accounts, telephone bills, mobile phone records, and even her body odour. Unable to take this anymore, she leaves him and moves in with Jack, a local gangster. Some degree of affinity between them begins to take shape: it may lead to a still closer relationship or a permanent friendship...

Hou Hsiao-Hsien

He was born in Guangdong, China, in 1947, and the following year his family moved to Taiwan. He studied directing at the National Taiwan Academy of Arts and was an assistant to Li Hsing and Lai Cheng-Ying. In 1980 he made his first feature film, ‘Cute Girl’, and in 1983 he attracted critical attention with ‘The Sandwich Man’, which placed him as a representative of the Taiwanese New Wave. ‘A City of Sadness’ earned a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989, while ‘The Puppet Master’ received the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993. His later films, including ‘Millenium Mambo’ (2001), were also screened at Cannes. As a producer, he was responsible for such classics as Edward Yang’s ‘Taipei Story’ (1985) and Zhang Yimou’s ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ (1991). In 2007, he won the Critics’ Award in Valladolid for ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’.