A barefoot monk in a red robe walks the length of San Sebastian's La Concha beach in "Dust," the 11th installment of director Tsai Ming-liang's "Walker" series. The film marks the first time the series has traveled to Spain and will debut at the Venice Film Festival before moving to the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Produced by Vitrine Filmes and Homegreen Films with backing from the Basque regional government's culture and language department, the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation and Tabakalera, the film continues a project Tsai launched in 2012 centered on actor Lee Kang-sheng walking in near-stillness through unfamiliar cities. Tsai said he traces the whole project back to a stage production more than a decade ago, where Lee's slow-walking performance struck him as an alternative to narrative cinema. "At the time, I had grown tired of making narrative films, and Lee's slow walk gave me the idea of making something non-narrative, a form of pure visual expression," he said.
Tsai scouted San Sebastian twice before settling on it, drawn to the city and its surroundings including Basque stone houses, an abandoned mining tunnel and the Peine del Viento sculptures. He said the light captivated him during filming: "The sunlight constantly shifting between brightness and shadow, falling across enormous sculptures, forests, streets, pedestrians and the Walker's red robe." The series has previously taken Lee through Taipei, Hong Kong, Kuching, Marseille, Tokyo, Yilan, Paris and Washington, D.C.
Tsai and Lee have collaborated for more than 30 years. Tsai described the series as a document of aging and a means of reading a place through the body. "We have watched Lee Kang-Sheng's body, appearance, and even his skin change," he said. "Only through looking at someone over a long period of time can the reality of a life be fully revealed."
"Dust" marks Tsai's return to Venice since winning the Golden Lion there in 1994 with "Vive L'Amour." Tsai said he views the distance between the two films not as a rupture but as an ongoing engagement with cinema's possibilities. "The 'Walker' series is clearly neither fiction nor documentary," he said. "It is simply a form of cinema, and it deserves to be seen in a cinema." A next "Walker" film will take place in Jeonju, Korea, following an invitation from the Jeonju International Film Festival.
