Best Director Award: Nie Yin Niang (The Assassin)

Director: Hou Hsiao Hsien
Writer: T'ien-wen Chu
Stars: Qi Shu, Chen Chang, Satoshi Tsumabuki
Runtime: 105 minutes

Plot: Based on a short story written during Tang dynasty, "Nie Ying Niang" is a story about assassin Nie's mission to assassinate a political rival.

Review: The story begins amidst the volatile power plays and political instabilities that marked the decline of the Tang Dynasty. It's here that we first meet Nie Yinniang (Shu), who was abducted from her family at the age of 10 by a nun, Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), who trained her to become an exceptionally lethal assassin tasked with killing corrupt officials. A lithe but imposing vision clad entirely in black, Yinniang gives us a taste of her prowess when she coolly executes a man on horseback. But Yinniang's ruthlessness fails her when she confronts another target and, moved by the presence of his young son, chooses to spare his life, spurring Jiaxin to send her protegee on a mission that will both punish her and rid her of all pity.

Freely reimagined from a story written by the Tang Dynasty scribe Pei Xing, titled "Nie Yinniang" after its formidable female protagonist, "The Assassin" employs the sort of rigorously off-center storytelling devices that will prove immediately recognizable to Hou's worldwide fanbase: a dense historical narrative laid out with unobtrusive intricacy, a masterfully distanced sense of camera placement, and an attentiveness to mise-en-scene that is almost Kubrickian in its perfectionism, as if a single absent detail or period inaccuracy would cause the whole thing to collapse. 

This is a work of strange and subtle power, unlike anything else that has screened at Cannes this year, and an extraordinary comeback from the exceptional Hou Hsiao Hsien. It was so impressive that it managed to win him the Best Director Award for this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Reviewed by Intisab Shahriyar