A 1998 Tsai Ming-liang film finally reaches U.S. theaters — and the timing is stranger than its plot

On a mid-July 2026 screen somewhere in the United States, audiences are watching a film made in 1998. The film is Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole, a 95-minute romance set in a rain-drenched, post-pandemic Taipei apartment block. It is opening in U.S. theatrical release for the first time in its life. The prints are new, struck on 35mm. The film is older than a sizable share of its potential audience.

That a Taiwanese art-house picture from the late 1990s is finally crossing the Pacific in a commercial window — and on celluloid — is less a footnote than a small index of how the American specialty-cinema market now operates. Distribution has consolidated, mid-budget adult dramas have largely migrated to streaming, and the repertory circuit is one of the few surviving channels through which a non-English-language film of this register can reach an American viewer at all.

The film, in plain terms

The Hole follows a man and a woman in adjacent Taipei apartments who, after a prolonged plumbing outage, begin communicating through a hole in the shared wall. The mood is unhurried; the camera lingers; rain is nearly a character. The picture is part of the slow-cinema current that ran through late-1990s East Asian art cinema, and Tsai's name is regularly grouped with that of Hou Hsiao-hsien and, on the mainland, Jia Zhangke.

What marks The Hole out within Tsai's own catalogue is its playfulness. The director has described it as the closest he has come to a musical: songs erupt, colour codes the seasons, and Lee Kang-sheng — Tsai's long-time on-screen avatar — sings rather than speaks at several points. The result is a film that even viewers resistant to the pace of the director's later work can find approachable.

Why 1998 is arriving in 2026

Industry coverage of the release frames it as a rediscovery rather than a debut. The picture screened at international festivals in 1998 and circulated in Taiwan and parts of Europe, but never secured a wide U.S. distributor. The intervening decades were not kind to that category of acquisition. The mid-budget specialty arms that once competed for art-house Asian titles — Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax's arthouse label, the various Weinstein-era imprints — have thinned or vanished. Streaming platforms, the structural replacement, have generally preferred library rights, not theatrical windows for late-1990s non-English-language titles.

What a small American distributor can still do in 2026 is run a limited theatrical campaign on 35mm, play to repertory cinemas in New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of university towns, and use that footprint as the spine of a marketing story. The format choice is doing real work here. The Hole was shot on film; exhibiting it on film is not a gimmick but a restoration of the work's intended surface. Several of Tsai's feature-length works have toured U.S. repertory circuits in recent years on restored prints, and the pattern now treats the filmmaker as a museum-grade figure even in his home market.

The structural picture underneath the news

A single repertory release would not normally merit a story. The interesting object is the pipeline that produced it. Three forces are visible at once.

First, the contraction of the U.S. specialty-cinema acquisition market. The number of independent distributors actively bidding on foreign-language art-house titles has narrowed to a small roster. That has two consequences: fewer such films get U.S. theatrical releases at all, and the ones that do tend to arrive with a curatorial frame already built around them — a festival pedigree, a director's catalogue, a director's celebrity advocacy — because the marketing budget for a fresh sell is no longer there.

Second, the 35mm revival as economic and aesthetic signal. Running new 35mm prints is operationally expensive; doing so in 2026 is a deliberate statement that the audience for this title is small, dedicated, and willing to travel. It is also a statement about format as content. A film built around long takes, deliberate sound design, and surface texture cannot be flattened into a streaming thumbnail without losing its argument with the viewer.

Third, the question of what the post-1998 generation of viewers inherits. Anyone under 35 in the United States who has heard of Tsai at all has heard of him through festival retrospectives, critical essays, or word of mouth — not through the experience of walking into a mall multiplex and encountering his work in commercial distribution. The Hole's U.S. arrival is, in that sense, a small corrective: a missing reference restored to a circulation channel. It is also a reminder that the missing-reference category is large and growing.

What to watch

The release's commercial performance, in the modest terms available to it, will set a quiet benchmark. If the 35mm campaign clears costs and travels to additional cities through the autumn, expect two follow-on effects: more of Tsai's catalogue reaching U.S. repertory screens on film, and renewed attention from the small number of distributors still willing to acquire foreign-language art-house titles for theatrical release. If it underperforms, the read is harsher — that even a curatorial release on the format the filmmaker chose cannot clear the floor that American specialty distribution has become.

Either outcome will arrive without the kind of publicity the major-studio summer season commands. That is the condition under which a 1998 film reaches U.S. theaters in 2026: quietly, on film, to rooms that had to be convinced individually. The picture itself is unlikely to mind the wait.

Desk note: this piece was scoped from a single IndieWire thread on the U.S. theatrical release of Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole*; the structural context on specialty distribution is editorial framing by this publication, not reportage drawn from the source.*

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/indiewire
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hole_(1998_film)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsai_Ming-liang
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35mm_movie_film