Hou Hsiao-Hsien's THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI Screens at New York's Asia Society and Museum on January 8th

STILL: HOU HSIAO-HSIEN’S THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

Tonight, January 8th, at 6:30pm, an imported 35mm print of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983) will screen at New York’s Asia Society and Museum as part of Films To See Before You Die, an ongoing monthly series featuring “classic films and underseen gems from across Asia and the Asian diaspora with extended introductions by Asia Society's Curator of Film.” GME distributes THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI in the collection HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: EARLY WORKS, which also features the filmmaker’s earlier features CUTE GIRL (1980) and THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME (1982). The collection is available to North American academic institutions as a DVD published by Cinematek, which includes three audiovisual essays by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López as bonus features, and is accompanied by a multi-lingual booklet by Tom Paulus.

In THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI, “Doze Niu plays Ah-Ching, who agitates his mother by spending time with Ah-rong (Chang Shih), Kuo-zai (Chao Peng-chue), and Ah-yu, a group of reprobates whose days are devoted to shooting pool and minor pranks and swindles. He daydreams about going to the cinema with his father, whose head was dented by a baseball years earlier and who now sits in a vegetative state on the family porch all day. When the boys skip town and show up unannounced at the apartment of Jang Chuen-fang, who plays Ah-rong's older sister, they soon meet her boyfriend— played by Hou himself. In what now feels like a prescient joke targeting the wide-angle long-take naturalism of the Taiwanese New Wave, Ah-rong and his friends buy tickets to a porn film from a street peddler only to find themselves in a derelict building with a demolished-wall-as-screen revealing the city’s vista.”

As a filmmaker, Hou Hsiao-Hsien is praised for his contemplative style, and THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI is notable for its “open-endedness” and “a distinctly elliptical approach that would become [a] Hou trademark.” As noted by Tom Paulus in the booklet accompanying GME’s DVD release of THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI: “It has been argued that this discontinuous, open approach to storytelling offers further proof of Hou’s Chineseness. But there are few aspects to this narrative style that Hou doesn’t share with Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Fassbinder, or Wenders.”

To acquire Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films for institutional use, please visit our ordering info page.