Dust

Tsai Ming-liang / Spain, Taiwan / 2026 / Czech Premiere / 80 min.

synopsis

A Buddhist monk as an art installation or a walking sculpture. In the twelfth instalment of the walking films that he has been making since 2011, the Taiwanese director places his lifelong muse Lee Kang-sheng in San Sebastián, Spain, contrary to his eleventh film, which was shot in Jihlava. Step by step, movement by movement, inhalation after exhalation, the barefoot man with a shaven head and red robe cuts slowly through the tumult of a punk concert crowd or passes sgraffito façades. A mystical presence in the urban landscape, he connects the old and the new, the calm and the chaotic, the banal and the inward. Slowness is more than meditation: it is an act of rebellion, the art of coming to a halt in today’s world.

“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. The way he walks is extraordinarily beautiful, and the idea of ‘slowness’ itself has great power.” — Tsai Ming- liang, Variety

biography

Tsai Ming-liang (1957) is a Malaysian-born filmmaker who lives and works in Taiwan. Alongside Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien, he is a leading figure of the Taiwanese New Wave. His work draws on slow cinema, conceptual art and performance, exploring loneliness, time and memory. He received the Contribution to World Cinema Award at the Ji.hlava IDFF, which presented a retrospective of his work across its 2024 and 2025 editions.