Tsai Ming-liang

Breaking away from previous installments of his stark, serene Walker series, No No Sleep reacquaints us with the moving body of Lee Kang-sheng’s monk, but shifts its setting to downtown Tokyo. Another luminous expression of Tsai Ming-liang’s increasingly refined filmmaking.

The first film in Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker series is this exquisite short, starring his regular actor Lee Kang-sheng. Inspired by the 7th-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, Walker is a call for contemplation, spirituality, and a slower pace of life in the face of the velocity of modern cities.