DAYS

The great Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang has been directing exquisite examinations of alienation, isolation, and the fleeting beauty of human connection featuring his muse Lee Kang-sheng for decades. His latest film, DAYS — his first feature-length fiction since 2013’s magnificent STRAY DOGS — will undoubtedly stand as one of his best, sparest and most intimate works. Lee once again stars as a variation on himself, wandering through a lonely urban landscape and seeking treatment in Hong Kong for a chronic illness. At the same time, a young Laotian immigrant working in Bangkok, played by Anong Houngheuangsy, goes about his daily routine. These two solitary men eventually come together in a moment of healing, tenderness and sexual release. Among the most cathartic entries in Tsai’s filmography, DAYS is a work of longing, constructed with the director’s customary brilliance at visual composition and shot through with profound empathy. (Synopsis from the New York Film Festival)

“...A reminder of the profundity and the emotional eloquence of stillness and near silence: this is a film where you can sit at length marveling at the curve in a country road at night…. On one level, DAYS has its dimension of clear-sighted socially specific realism, but it would be no misrepresentation to see the film, on another, as a full body massage for the soul.” —Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

“Like all of Tsai's films, this communicates feelings of loneliness and alienation inherent to the human condition; but perhaps more than any other, it revels in the corporeality of Tsai's performers, finding delicate mystery in even the most banal actions.” —Kathleen Sachs, Chicago Reader