The Summer’s Most Beautifully Strange New Movie Is from 1998: Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘The Hole,’ in U.S. Theaters for the First Time
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- Tsai Ming-liang's 1998 film "The Hole" opens in U.S. theaters for the first time with new 35mm prints, starting July 10 at New York's Film at Lincoln Center with a nationwide rollout to follow.
- "The Hole" is an 88-minute Mandarin-language romance set entirely inside a crumbling Taipei tenement during an apocalyptic nonstop-rain event and airborne illness, starring Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei as neighbors separated by a hole in the floor.
- The film was originally commissioned by Haut et Court as part of a "2000, Seen By…" millennium omnibus project alongside works from Hal Hartley, Don McKellar, Abderrahmane Sissako, Laurent Cantet, Walter Salles, and Ildikó Enyedi.
- Tsai said the 35mm re-release grew out of his 2025 retrospective in Austin, and that he believes "films are no longer films if you do not watch them in cinemas," lamenting that in China, "the entire generation of moviegoers only have the chance to watch my film through bootleg DVDs or illegal downloads."
- The film features five musical sequences choreographed to 1950s Hong Kong pop star Grace Chang's tunes, which Tsai introduced to counter the "absolute and extreme despair" of the nonstop-rain setting.
- Tsai and his crew rented two apartments in a Taipei public housing slum for a month of shooting, generating nonstop rain that angered nearby residents, with Tsai praying daily at a local temple before each day of filming.
Why it matters: For cinephiles, the run restores a key Tsai Ming-liang work to its intended 35mm theatrical format nearly 30 years after release, arriving amid a repertury re-release boom driven by Letterboxd demand and the output of Janus Films and Criterion — and Tsai uses the moment to argue that cinema-going itself must survive the streaming era.
