A 1998 Film Is the Surprise of the Summer: Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘The Hole’ Returns in 35mm
Twenty-eight years after it debuted at Cannes, Tsai Ming-liang’s rain-soaked, musically charged two-hander is back in U.S. theaters on fresh 35mm prints — and it has lost none of its strange power.
On 10 July 2026, IndieWire flagged a release that, on paper, should not exist: a 35mm theatrical run of a 1998 art-house film that barely scraped the arthouse circuit the first time around. New prints of Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole are now in U.S. cinemas for the first time — a feat of film programming in a year when the format itself is treated, by most exhibitors, as a curatorial courtesy rather than a commercial proposition.
The film’s reappearance is a small, specific event with a large argument attached. For three decades, Tsai’s slow-cinema idiom — strangers in rooms, water on concrete, bodies refusing to hurry — has been the lingua franca of cinephile discourse even as the films themselves have grown harder to see. The Hole is, among other things, a test of whether that audience still exists outside festival queues and boutique home-video labels.
What the film actually is
The Hole began life as a music-video commission that grew, over the late 1990s, into Tsai’s sixth feature: a romance set in a rain-drenched apartment block in an unnamed Asian metropolis, where a sickly man (Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s lifelong alter ego and the only professional actor in his regular company) and his upstairs neighbour (Yang Kuei-mei, the actress Tsai had built Vive L’Amour around three years earlier) discover a hole in the floor that becomes a portal, a confessional and a structural conceit all at once.
The film intercuts its two character studies with brightly coloured musical numbers — three or four pop-song-and-dance set-pieces in which the leads, drenched and faintly absurd, lip-sync and shimmy for the camera. IndieWire’s notice underlines how odd the result still feels: a morbidity-tinged romance braided into a variety-show format, scored by a jazz-inflected pop palette, and photographed with the long-take patience Tsai had been refining since Rebels of the Neon God (1993). The 1998 release played Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and gathered a thin international distribution footprint; a U.S. theatrical bow, in any format, did not follow.
The new 35mm prints are the headline. They are not a restoration in the usual sense — The Hole is not a lost film — but a fresh photochemical strike, which is to say the kind of artefact that can only be made when a lab is willing to commit to a small, finite run and a distributor is willing to amortise the cost across a city-by-city booking pattern that looks, to anyone used to platform-aggregated opening weekends, almost archaeological.
Why a 1998 film in 2026
Three things make this less quixotic than it sounds. The first is the audience. Tsai’s name has carried through two generations of cinephile culture on the strength of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center; of a Criterion-adjacent home-video canon; and of his later international co-productions, including Stray Dogs (2013), which played Venice and Taipei to genuine critical acclaim.
The second is the institutional pull of Tsai’s own production house. Since the late 2000s, his films have increasingly been financed, distributed and exhibited through small, art-house–aligned operations in Taiwan, France and Japan, and through his own Homegreen Films banner — a structure that has kept his work in circulation even when larger distributors stepped back. The Hole’s 35mm re-release sits inside that pattern: a filmmaker who controls the rights to his own archive, working with partners who can be patient about scale.
The third is the wider 35mm revival. Repertory cinemas in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and the Bay Area have spent the past four years programming genuine photochemical prints rather than digital restorations of photochemical films. The economics remain marginal; the audiences, by all accounts, are real and loyal enough to keep a print alive for two or three weeks in a single city. A new 35mm print of a 28-year-old arthouse film, in that context, is a rational gamble — a curated event rather than a wide release.
The argument the re-release makes
The interesting question is what kind of cultural object a film becomes when it has to be re-physicalised to be seen. Digital restoration kept The Hole available on festival screens and on boutique Blu-ray; the new 35mm prints insist on a different encounter. The grain, the colour palette of those musical numbers, and the rhythm of Tsai’s long takes are — by the consensus of critics who have seen the new prints — different experiences in photochemical form. Lee and Yang’s faces, captured at the precise midpoint of Tsai’s career-long collaboration with cinematographer Liao Pen-jung, register differently on film stock than on any digital intermediate.
There is a structural point lurking underneath the programming decision. Western arthouse cinema has spent the last decade consolidating around streaming-window releases, festival-driven prestige and a handful of platform-friendly masters. Against that backdrop, a Taiwanese slow-cinema director’s 28-year-old film returning to cinemas on physical film stock is not nostalgia; it is an insistence on a particular kind of spectatorship that the platform economy cannot deliver. Whether the U.S. market will sustain even a limited run is the genuine open question — and one IndieWire, in its notice, pointedly did not try to answer.
What to watch
The prints will land city by city. New York and Los Angeles are the conventional anchors for any Tsai release in the U.S.; the IndieWire notice does not specify a booking pattern, which is itself a signal that this is a tour, not a platform release. If the run holds past a second weekend in a single city, the argument for further 35mm engagements of mid-period Tsai — Vive L’Amour, The River, What Time Is It There? — becomes materially stronger, because the economics of a new print improve once a lab can amortise setup costs across more than one title.
For now, the offer is narrow and specific: a chance to see The Hole, on film, in a room with strangers. That has been Tsai Ming-liang’s pitch for thirty years, and it remains the only one he is interested in making.
Desk note: this desk covered Tsai’s reappearance as a curatorial story with industrial stakes — the question of whether physical-format repertory cinema can sustain a non-American, non-blockbuster catalogue title in 2026 — rather than as a feature review. The wire trade press treated it as a programming announcement; Monexus treats the 35mm element itself as the lede.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/s/indiewire/1024
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hole_(1998_film)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsai_Ming-liang
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kang-sheng