Tsai Ming-liang Returns to Venice With Non-Narrative 'Dust' — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Dust" debuts at the Venice Film Festival before moving to the San Sebastian Film Festival, marking the 11th installment of Tsai Ming-liang's "Walker" series, which he launched in 2012 after a slow-walking Lee Kang-sheng stage performance.
- Lee Kang-sheng walks barefoot in a red robe through San Sebastian — past La Concha, Chillida Leku and the Peine del Viento — in the first Walker film set in Spain, produced by Vitrine Filmes and Homegreen Films with backing from the Basque regional government, Taiwan's PTS Foundation and Tabakalera.
- Tsai Ming-liang frames the project's signature slowness as "a form of rebellion" against cinema that trains viewers to process images rather than look at them, arguing theaters should be able to "contain all kinds of films, not only narrative films or documentaries."
- Tsai and Lee Kang-sheng have collaborated for more than 30 years, since "Vive L'Amour" won Venice's Golden Lion in 1994; Tsai calls filming Lee "the greatest gift heaven has given me" and describes the Walker project as a record of how "Lee Kang-Sheng's body, appearance, and even his skin" have changed.
- The next Walker film heads to Jeonju, Korea, on invitation from the Jeonju Intl. Film Festival; Tsai says the series will end "only when either Lee Kang-Sheng or I am no longer here," and that he'd like to make one more narrative film "that is not really a narrative film."
Why it matters: Tsai returns to Venice 31 years after his Golden Lion for "Vive L'Amour" with a formally opposite, non-narrative work — explicitly arguing cinema can hold more than narrative or documentary. For major festivals and arthouse programmers, the test is whether Tsai's patient, dialogue-free Walker still earns a spot on the Venice–San Sebastian marquee in an industry that has consolidated around story-driven formats.
Ask SkimNews
