As it marks its 25th anniversary, the JEONJU International Film Festival is bringing together ten works in the Walker Series by world-renowned director Tsai Ming-Liang. The festival’s connection with Tsai began with A Conversation with God (2001), the director’s first digital short film and a part of JEONJU Digital Project. With its history of supporting films that are free from the conventions of cinematic expression, the festival is especially honored to be able to establish a new historical connection with a director who has become a living symbol of innovation.
If anything, it seems to apply too limiting a perspective on Tsai’s body of work to call him simply a “film director,” as he has spent more than three decades creating high-quality work in genres spanning television, cinema, performances, and art. The reason we insist on referring to him as such is because of the way he focuses on “images of moving time.” In 2013, he declared that he would no longer make films using commercial approaches. In the decade since then, he has provided several films featuring a walker as a protagonist.
Walker Series is a collection of works featuring actor Lee Kang-Sheng as the eponymous character, who dresses in red Buddhist monk’s robes as he walks slowly in bare feet. The series began in 2012 with No Form. It was followed by Walker, which was presented the same year at the Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week. The long journey has continued through the tenth and most recent work Abiding Nowhere, which debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024.
The ten films draw inspiration from the figure of Xuanzang, who appears in the Chinese classic story Journey to the West. That novel is the story of a Buddhist monk (Xuanzang) during the Tang Dynasty, who departed for the Western Regions (Central Asia and India) to obtain Sanskrit scriptures in spite of a ban on traveling. He experiences various hardships before finally returning with the scripts. Imagining how Xuanzang would have had to cross the desert on foot at a time when there were no trains or cars, Tsai developed this into the image of the Walker. The monk played by Lee Kang-Sheng in the film walks barefoot through today’s world. His journey starts in Taipei and continues through Hong Kong, the Malaysian city of Kuching, the northern Taiwanese community of Zhuangwei, Paris, Marseille, Tokyo, and Washington, DC. For viewers, it affords an experience of meditation and enlightenment.
Resembling beautiful paintings in motion, the films recall the words spoken by the director: “Can we see films the way we look at paintings or sculptures? I draw films, as though making sketches.” Walker Series shows cinema to be an art form of images that are not limited to storytelling, revealing how cinema not only exhibits aesthetic beauty but also reflects reality in its form. It also encourages us to take our time in viewing the world reflected in the mirror of the screen. Without incidents, the feet of the Walker simply keep moving forward slowly, one step at a time, as the materiality created through pure repetition opens the gateway to our own interior world. For viewers, Tsai has used the film medium to create a beautiful and elegant pathway to contemplation of the self and the world. Within a perfect aesthetic illusion of reality, we come to witness the purest form of cinema.
The films of Tsai Ming-Liang have to do with the human soul.
Programmer Sung MOON
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