Tsai Ming-liang's inclination towards loneliness, alienation and ‘slowness’ in his films can be traced back to the earlier years of his life and career. Born in Kuching, Malaysia in 1957, Tsai spent a great deal of his youth attending local screenings of international films with his grandparents (Hughes, n.p.). Tsai has commented that his ‘slow-paced childhood’ allowed him to observe life in his home town from a leisurely perspective, arguably, according to Darren Hughes, the same perspective that characterises the slow style of his films. At the age of twenty, Tsai moved to Taipei and entered the Chinese Culture University where he studied film and drama and was exposed to the most famous of the European auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut and Robert Bresson. In 1982, the year that Tsai graduated from the Chinese Culture University, Taiwan was in an era of transformation: America had passed the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979 and democratisation was in sight.