The Cinema Guild has announced the Blu-ray release of Tsai Ming-liang's
Stray Dogs, starring Shiang-chyi Chen, Kang-sheng Lee, Yi Cheng Lee, Yi Chieh Lee and Yi-Ching Lu. The Taiwanese-French drama won the Grand Jury Prize at the 70th Venice International Film Festival and arrives on Blu-ray on January 13, 2015.
Synopsis: A single father makes his meager living holding up an advertising placard on a traffic island in the middle of a busy highway. His children wait out their days in supermarkets before they eat with their father and go to sleep in an abandoned building. As the father starts to come apart, a woman in the supermarket takes the children under her wing. There are real stray dogs to be fed in Tsai's everyday apocalypse, but the title also refers to its principal characters, living the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world.
Stray Dogs is many things at once: minimal in its narrative content and syntax, as visually powerful as it is emotionally overwhelming, and bracingly pure in both its anger and its compassion. One of the finest works of an extraordinary artist.
Stray Dogs is presented at its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 with Mandarin DTS-MA 5.1 surround and English subtitles. Special features include:
- Journey to the West, a film by Tsai Ming-liang (2014, 52 minutes)
- Tsai Ming-liang Master Class at the Cinémathèque Française – Blu-ray Exclusive (69 minutes)
- Theatrical Trailer
- Booklet featuring essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum