Opening night

8.00 pm – Cinema 1 – Preview in the presence of the filmmaker and actors 

Tsai Ming-Liang, Days. Taiwan, 2020, 127 min, DCP, colour, without dialogues 
With Lee Kang-Sheng, Anong Houngheuangsy  
Berlinale 2020 – competition  

 
Hsiao-Kang lives alone in a large house. Through a glass façade, he watches the tops of the trees being buffeted by wind and rain. For years he has suffered from a strange, scarcely bearable ailment that grips his whole body. Non lives in Bangkok in a small apartment, methodically preparing the traditional dishes of his native village. When Hsiao-Kang meets Non in a hotel room, the two men share their loneliness. 

"What is a shot? It is the time it takes an image to record a gesture, to register a print of a motif, to reveal a meaning. This is the whole phenomenological and glaring beauty of Tsai Ming-Liang's cinema, confronting us with the mute insistence of orphan presences and disconnected spaces, in which movement is wrestled from immobility (static shots at the heart of his lexicon) and meaning from contact with the greatest insignificance (Days, is these lost hours and days, these ordinary activities in blind succession until the encounter takes place)." Mathieu Macheret, Cahiers du cinéma, n° 768, September 2020