Special Screening and Director Q&A: The Assassin (2015)

UCLA Center for Chinese Studies helps host a screening of award-winning Taiwanese film The Assassin followed by a Q & A with the film's director, Hou Hsiao-hsien

The Assassin

Q&A with director Hou Hsiao-hsien
Moderated by Justin Chang, Variety

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“The Best Film of the Cannes Film Festival. A masterful film. The level of artistry was so much higher than anything else in the festival that everyone was, in one way or another, ravished.”
– John Powers, NPR

“Thrillingly beautiful. Filled with palace intrigue, expressive silences, flowing curtains, whispering trees and some of the most ravishingly beautiful images to have graced this festival (Cannes).”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Official Taiwan entry
Best Foreign Language Film – Academy Awards® 2016
Winner – Best Director, Cannes Film Festival 2015
Opens October 16 from Well Go USA

*****

UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
UCLA Center for Chinese Studies
UCLA Film & Television Archive
UCLA Boethius Initiative
Asia Society Southern California

present a special screening of

THE ASSASSIN (2015)
刺客聶隱娘

7:00 PM
@ ArcLight Hollywood
Theater 10, 6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles

Q&A with director Hou Hsiao-hsien
Moderated by Justin Chang – Chief Film Critic, Variety
Translation by Robert Chi – Associate Professor, UCLA Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures

Acclaimed director Hou Hsiao-hsien remolds the classic wuxia of martial combat and supernatural feats into mesmeric poetry. Hou’s first film in 7 years shocks with its heart-stopping beauty. The director and his collaborators – chief among them co-screenwriter Chu Tien-wen, cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, costume and production designer Hwarng Wern-ying, sound editor Tu Duu-chih, and composer Lim Giong – limn an evocative 9th-century Tang Dynasty of brocades and shimmering silks, vividly orange sunsets, a birch tree forest (echoing the bamboo forests beloved of an earlier wuxia maestro, King Hu), white mist creeping up a mountain cliff, choruses of bird calls and pounding martial beats. In the shadows lurks a female assassin (Shu Qi), returned from exile with a test from her nun master to kill the ruler of a province who was once her betrothed (Chang Chen). This is a wuxia of silences and observation, punctuated by sudden leaps and the lethal glint of a blade. It is jianghu as only Hou could imagine.
– Cheng-Sim Lim

Screenwriters: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chu Tien-wen, Hsieh Hai-meng, Zhong Acheng. Cinematographer: Mark Lee Ping-bing. Production Designer/Costume Designer: Hwarng Wern-ying. Editing Director: Liao Ching-sung. Editor: Huang Chih-chia. Sound Editor: Tu Duu-chih. Composer: Lim Giong. Cast: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Zhou Yun, Tsumabuki Satoshi, Juan Ching-tian, Hsieh Hsin-ying, Sheu Fang-yi.
DCP, in Mandarin with English subtitles, 104 min.

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Admission is by invitation only.
For further information, please call: (310) 267-4121.

Reserved tickets will be available for pick-up at the will-call table in the ArcLight lobby starting 6:15 pm the day of the event. Please note tickets will be held only until 6:45 PM; all unclaimed tickets after that time will be released.

Parking: $4 for up to 4 hours with ArcLight theater validation, in the lot adjacent to the theater. Enter from Ivar, Morningside or DeLongpre.