DAYS

* Limited tickets available.

Teddy Jury Award, 2020 Berlin International Film Festival

There are few words in Tsai Ming-liang’s DAYS, and when there are, they go unsubtitled.

One could say DAYS is about two lonely people from different worlds brought together for one single night. Or DAYS is a love letter to Tsai’s muse of 30 years, Lee Kang-sheng, whose face is now middle-aged but whose eyes remain pensive as ever. Or DAYS is a documentary about newcomer Anong Houngheuangsy, a Laotian migrant worker in Thailand who prays, cooks, works, and sleeps. Or DAYS is about trees reflected in a windowpane during a rainstorm, or the washing of vegetables and fish in preparation for a meal, or a cat wandering from one side of a building to the other, or a shared look in bed, or a shared meal together, or the tinkling of a sentimental Charlie Chaplin tune in a music box that becomes the only trace of an encounter.

Words, as DAYS reveals, are too much and never enough.

Late capitalism makes familiar strangers of us all, but DAYS redeems the generous pace of physical experience and revives our powers of observation. The beauty of Tsai’s cinema is not in events unfolding: it’s in the unyielding patience and wondrous attunement to the minor details that make up the stuff of our everyday lives.

–Anthony Yooshin Kim