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Welcome to our foreign films page, featuring foreign movies in video and DVD format in languages from a host of countries. Note: unless stated otherwise, all videocassettes are in VHS and NTSC format, and all DVDs are for players that support Region 1 encoding (United States and Canada) and are in NTSC format. Check our DVD Compatibility FAQ for more information about region encoding, television formats, and other specifications. If you can't find what you need, please email us.
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I Don't Want to Sleep Alone Tsai Ming-liang Tsai Ming-liang's beautiful and almost nonverbal film about a love triangle in the slums of Kuala Lumpur. Rawang (Norman Atun), an immigrant squatting in a communal building, takes in a Chinese drifter named Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-Sheng), who he finds beaten in the street. A dreamlike eroticism develops and transforms into outright romance when Chyi (Chen Shang-Chyi), a lonely waitress, enters the picture. As was the case with Goodbye Dragon Inn, the director's tendencies toward minimalism and a static camera have the effect of amplifying character dynamics and the slapstick situations that surface. Nominated for the Golden Lion and Winner of the Cinema for Peace Award at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. Also known as Hei Yan Quan. In Chinese, Mandarin, Malay and Bengali with English subtitles. Taiwan, 2006, 118 mins. DVD | $44.95
Goodbye Dragon Inn Tsai Ming-liang With his minimalist masterpiece What Time is it There?, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang paid implicit tribute to Antonioni's bleak modernism and Harold Lloyd's slapstick silents. In Goodbye Dragon Inn - an even sparser and more rigorously composed film - Ming-Liang fashions an explicit homage to the world of movies. Set in a crumbling Taipei movie palace during a screening of the 1968 martial arts classic Dragon Inn, Ming-Liang's camera follows a clubfooted theatre manager, a lonely Japanese moviegoer, and other characters to evoke a poetic valentine to a dying cinematic age. "A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence" (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). In Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles. Taiwan, 2004, 83 mins. DVD | $37.95
The Wayward Cloud Tsai Ming-liang A follow-up to What Time Is It There? and the short The Skywalk Is Gone, The Wayward Cloud is another slowly-paced, provocative, and very postmodern picture from Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang. Though stars Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi reappear, the real attention-grabbers here are the watermelon motifs, absurd musical numbers, and a sexually-explicit finale that forced some festival audience members towards the door. As for the vague plot, the one-time watch vendor played by Kang-sheng has turned to acting in porn in Taipei, where he reunites with his former nymphet (Shiang-chyi) amidst a severe water shortage. This partially explains all the watermelons, but the rest is up to psychoanalysis. Winner of three Berlin Film Festival awards. ADULTS ONLY. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Taiwan/France, 2006, 114 mins. DVD | $44.95
What Time Is It There? Tsai Ming-liang With his distinctively quiet, deliberately paced style and moments of absurdist humor, Tsai Ming-liang explores cross-continental loneliness in one of the best-reviewed films of his career. A street vendor sells a watch to a young woman leaving for Paris. Profoundly moved by his encounter, he begins to set clocks and watches to Paris time. Meanwhile, romantic and sexual longing play into the solitary lives of the vendor, his one-time customer in France, and his mother at home in Taipei. Truffaut's classic The 400 Blows also figures into things, with Jean-Pierre Leaud making a memorable appearance. "...a rare film that actually expands and deepens in the memory when its time on screen has run out" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly). Mandarin, Taiwanese and French, with English subtitles. Taiwan/France, 2001, 116 mins. DVD | $37.95
