Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Hou Hsiao-hsien (born 8 April 1947) is a Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin (2015).

Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics put together by The Village Voice and Film Comment. In a 1998 New York Film Festival worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema." In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, fourteen critics and two directors named A City of Sadness (1989) one of the ten greatest films ever made, placing it at #117 in the overall critics' poll.

Life and Career Overview

A Hakka, Hou Hsiao-Hsien was born in Mei County, Guangdong province (China) in 1947. He and his family fled the Chinese Civil War to Taiwan the following year. Hou was educated at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts.