Unknown Pleasures

Half the Sky

Crossroads with Luo Yonghao

This is a long-form, in-depth podcast hosted by Luo Yonghao, with each episode running three to five hours. We engage in extended conversations with figures shaped by the currents of our time, focusing on technology and the humanities—telling personal stories of fate and exploring the forces driving our era.

Golden Horse Awards

The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards (Chinese: 台北金馬影展; pinyin: Táiběi Jīnmǎ Yǐngzhǎn; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-pak Kim-má iáⁿ-tián) is a film festival and awards ceremony held annually in Taiwan. It was founded in 1962 by the Government Information Office of the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. The awards ceremony is usually held in November or December in Taipei, although the event has also been held in other locations in Taiwan in recent times

Thirteen Talks

Citizen Kitano

Takeshi Kitano is an international icon. We know the actor, the multi-award-winning filmmaker, but many ignore his double personality: the crazy TV star, the street kid from Tokyo close to the Yakuza, and the political satirist who blasted taboos! Can we dream of a better guide to introduce us to the cultural history of Japan?

A Touch of Sin

Four people in different provinces are driven to violent ends: An angry miner is enraged by corruption in his village. A migrant discovers the possibilities of owning a firearm. A receptionist is pushed beyond her limits by an abusive client. A young factory worker goes from one job to the next.

Still Life

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

Mr. Tree

Teased by hallucinations, Shu, a slacker living in a rural village, struggles with an ever-loosening grip on reality. Yet when one of his visions manifests as real, his fellow villagers come to regard him as a clairvoyant. Can Shu genuinely see into the future? Is he actually just a basket case? Or is he perhaps more lucid than he seems, and pulling a fast one on everyone?

Memories Look at Me

Fang comes back to her parents’ home in Nanjing, to spend some time with them. During her stay, her elder brother’s family comes for a family reunion, she receives a Yengisar knife as a gift and her sister-in-law tries to set her up on a blind date. Around her, time goes by, memories come back in the conversations, some she knows, some not. The present is mixed up with the past, and the steps towards the future may walk along the path of eternal loss.

Being Towards Death

After a failed suicide attempt, Zhang Xiaobing (Jiang Long) is sent to Ward 10 — a ward for the critically ill, but strangely full of joy. Among patients clinging to life, a man who wanted to die discovers the courage to live.

Mountains May Depart

The life of Tao, and those close to her, is explored in three different time periods: 1999, 2014, and 2025.

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

Filmmaker Jia Zhangke chronicles his local literature festival in Shanxi, China which includes a multi-generational roster of the country's most esteemed writers.

Ash Is Purest White

Set in China's underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows a dancer who fired a gun to protect her mobster boyfriend during a fight. On release from prison 5 years later, she sets out to find him.

Caught by the Tides

Years after her boyfriend left her for the big city and promised to bring her there after he’s settled down, a Chinese woman sets out on a journey to be reunited with him.

Walking on the Wild Side

Han Jie’s feature debut draws on his own experiences growing up in a desolate mining district in northern China’s Shanxi province. A Chinese road movie, Walking on the Wild Side charts a young gang’s continuous flights from one kind of trouble to the next. Mirroring the stark and barren landscape, the film relays the grim story of these delinquents’ dreams of liberty and easy money. Played by nonprofessional actors who are real life troublemakers, the film offers a realism that is at once oppressive, cruel, and sympathetic.

Life After Life

A hare is let loose in the forest, a dog gives chase and the boy tears after them, his father in tentative pursuit. Minutes pass, the forest falls silent, and when the boy re-enters the frame, something has changed: he now speaks with the voice of his dead mother. Mingchung shows little surprise at Xiuying’s return, he even asks why she didn’t come earlier. She says she’ll leave again once she’s completed one simple task, to replant the tree that stands before their now abandoned home.

The Reader

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.

Chiko

This is the story of Isa, who grows up in a Hamburg suburb. It might be one of the world's richest cities but every beast has its belly and here, in the very underbelly, Chiko lives in a world where violence, staking and keeping a claim, and drug taking are the norm. Where down is not an option, Chiko is determined to rise to the top, whatever and whomever it costs.

Napoleon Dynamite

A listless and alienated teenager decides to help his new friend win the class presidency in their small western high school, while he must deal with his bizarre family life back home.

Ken Park

Teen skater Ken Park (nicknamed Krap Nek; his name spelled and pronounced backward) kills himself at a Visalia skate park; his death bookends the lives of four other young people who knew him: Shawn, the most conventional; Tate brims with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother; and Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.

Juno

Faced with an unplanned pregnancy, sixteen year old high-schooler, Juno MacGuff, makes an unusual decision regarding her unborn child.

Pump Up the Volume

Mark Hunter, a lonely high school student, uses his shortwave radio to moonlight as the popular pirate DJ "Hard Harry." When his show gets blamed for a teen committing suicide, the students clash with high school faculty and the authorities.

Twilight

When Bella Swan moves to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, a mysterious classmate who reveals himself to be a 108-year-old vampire. Despite Edward's repeated cautions, Bella can't stay away from him, a fatal move that endangers her own life.

The Karate Kid Part II

Summoned by his dying father, Miyagi returns to his homeland of Okinawa, with Daniel, after a 40-year exile. There he must confront Yukie, the love of his youth, and Sato, his former best friend turned vengeful rival. Sato is bent on a fight to the death, even if it means the destruction of their village. Daniel finds his own love in Yukia's niece, Kumiko, and his own enemy in Sato's nephew, the vicious Chozen. Now, far away from the tournaments, cheering crowds and safety of home, Daniel will face his greatest challenge ever when the cost of honor is life itself.

Dude, Where's My Car?

Two stoners wake up after a night of partying and cannot remember where they parked their car.

Superbad

Two co-dependent high school seniors are forced to deal with separation anxiety after their plan to stage a booze-soaked party goes awry.

Bugsy Malone

New York, 1929, a war rages between two rival gangsters, Fat Sam and Dandy Dan. Dan is in possession of a new and deadly weapon, the dreaded "splurge gun". As the custard pies fly, Bugsy Malone, an all-round nice guy, falls for Blousey Brown, a singer at Fat Sam's speakeasy. His designs on her are disrupted by the seductive songstress Tallulah who wants Bugsy for herself.

TMNT

After the defeat of their old arch nemesis, The Shredder, the Turtles have grown apart as a family. Struggling to keep them together, their rat sensei, Splinter, becomes worried when strange things begin to brew in New York City.

Y Tu Mamá También

In Mexico, two teenage boys and an attractive older woman embark on a road trip and learn a thing or two about life, friendship, sex, and each other.

Notes on a Scandal

A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.

I Stand Alone

After completing jail time for beating up a man who tried to seduce his mentally-handicapped teenage daughter, the Butcher wants to start life anew. He institutionalizes his daughter and moves to the Lille suburbs with his mistress, who promises him a new butcher shop. Learning that she lied, the Butcher returns to Paris to find his daughter.

Cruel Intentions 2

After his precocious behavior has gotten him bounced out of one more in a string of exclusive private schools, 16-year old Sebastian Valmont has arrived in New York City to live with his father and stepmother. The cunning and handsome Sebastian may have met his match, however, in his equally manipulative and beautiful stepsister Kathryn Merteuil.