Hou Hsiao-hsien (; born 8 April 1947) is a Mainland Chinese-born Taiwanese film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He is a leading figure in world cinema and in Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for his film A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Assassin (2015). Other highly regarded works of his include The Puppetmaster (1993) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998). Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics by The Village Voice and Film Comment. In a 1998 New York Film Festival worldwide critics' poll, Hou was named "one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema." A City of Sadness ranked 117th in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made. In 2017, Metacritic ranked Hsiao-hsien 16th on its list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century. Life and career Hou Hsiao-hsien was born in Meixian District, Guangdong in 1947 to a Hakka family. Later that same year, Hou's father took a job as Head Secretary for the Mayor of Taichung City. The rest of the family joined him in Taiwan the following year and in 1949 he was made Supervisor of the Taipei Educational Bureau. Hou was educated at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts. Internationally, Hou is known for his austere and aesthetically rigorous dramas dealing with the upheavals of Taiwanese (and occasionally larger Chinese) history of the past century by viewing its impacts on individuals or small groups of characters. A City of Sadness (1989), for example, portrays a family caught in conflicts between the local Taiwanese and the newly arrived Chinese Nationalist government after World War II. It was groundbreaking for broaching the long-taboo February 28 Incident and ensuing White Terror. It became a major critical and commercial success, and garnered the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, making it the first Taiwanese film to win the top prize at the prestigious international film festival. His storytelling is elliptical and his style marked by extreme long takes with minimal camera movement but intricate choreography of actors and space within the frame. He uses extensive improvisation to arrive at the final shape of his