Hui jia

Continuing Tsai Ming-liang’s streak of video work since he “retired” from directing scripted features, HUI JIA documents a visit to close collaborator Anong Honghueangsy’s hometown in Laos during the early months of 2025. Self-built houses of diverse shapes and sizes set against the lush Laotian countryside are interspersed with vignettes of everyday life in the surroundings. The presence of Honghueangsy in the latter subtly recalls Tsai’s last narrative feature DAYS (2020): while that film showed his routine as a migrant worker in Thailand, HUI JIA suggests a return home. In shooting rural Laos, Tsai isn’t interested in either denouncing poor living conditions nor actively pursuing tropical photogénie, even though his compositions are both visually arresting and layered with meaning. Instead, as in much of his work, the images seek to distil an emotion from a given space in a specific moment, extending a sense of shared intimacy to the attentive viewer. Herein lies an affirmation of the filmmaker’s subjectivity, of his position as a gleaner of sights, that is made explicit in the closing shot of a clean bed in a hotel room. A film that vindicates the first-person singular, HUI JIA embodies an idea of cinema as an art of impressions. (Salvador Amores)

Tsai Ming-liang (Selection): REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1992), VIVE L’AMOUR (1994), THE RIVER (1997), THE HOLE (1998), WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001), GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003), THE WAYWARD CLOUD (2005), I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE (2006), FACE (2009), STRAY DOGS (2013), NO NO SLEEP (2015), AFTERNOON (2015), THE DESERTED (2017), YOUR FACE (2018), DAYS (2020), ABIDING NOWHERE (2024)