Of the ten films that Hou Hsiao-Hsien has directed between 1980 and 1989, seven received best film and/or best director awards from prestigious international films festivals in Venice, Berlin, Hawaii and the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes. In a 1988 worldwide critics' poll, Hou was championed as "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema."Hou's birthplace, a county in Kuangtung Province, had been well known as an intellectual center in China. In 1948 his family moved to Taiwan and, like all children raised there, he went through an extremely demanding
