General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Stray Dogs

Stray Dogs (郊遊; Jiao You) is a 2013 drama film directed by the Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, following a homeless father and his two young children surviving on the margins of Taipei. A Taiwan–France co-production in Mandarin, it runs 138 minutes and won the Grand Jury Prize, the second-highest honor, at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, where it was the only Chinese-language film in competition.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / director	郊遊 (Jiao You), directed by Tsai Ming-liang, born in Malaysia in 1957¹^•³
Production	Taiwan and France, 2013, color, DCP, 138 minutes, Mandarin¹
Lead	Lee Kang-sheng as a single father working as a human billboard holding real-estate advertising placards in traffic²
Venice 2013	Grand Jury Prize at the 70th festival; Tsai's fourth competition entry for the Golden Lion²^•⁴
Golden Horse Awards (50th, 2013)	Won Best Director and Best Leading Actor; nominated for Best Feature Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Sound Effects⁵
Other honors	Asia-Pacific Film Festival Best Actor and Best Sound; Dubai Best Director; Tallinn Special Jury Prize; Seville Best Director⁵
Critical reception	Metascore 84 ("universal acclaim"); 86% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Story and characters

The film follows Hsiao-kang, played by Tsai's longtime collaborator Lee Kang-sheng, a man Lee and the Golden Horse festival page describe as a "useless" man who earns his living holding up advertising placards in heavy traffic, smoking and urinating between shifts while the cars roar past.¹ His only people are his two young children, played by Lee Yi-cheng and Lee Yi-chieh, who in the English-language materials are listed among the cast alongside the adult leads.⁸ The family has no running water or electricity and sleeps together on a single worn mattress, huddled around a cabbage.¹

A woman, played by Chen Shiang-chyi, works at a supermarket where the children spend their days, and takes an interest in them.⁸ In the film's second half the story shifts register: the family moves into a decaying apartment dominated by a large mural of a ruined landscape, and the narrative turns toward the surreal. Time Out's review notes the disorienting choice to have the female character played by three different performers, Yang Kuei-mei, Lu Yi-ching, and Chen Shiang-chyi, all regulars in Tsai's films.⁹ The title refers both to real stray dogs in the film and to its principal characters, living what Film at Lincoln Center calls "the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world."⁸

Style

Tsai is known for long, nearly motionless takes, and Stray Dogs pushes the method to an extreme. The Guardian's Mark Kermode wrote that the film "requires a tolerance for extended shots of people looking, sleeping, eating and suffering," and singled out a ten-minute scene in which the father attempts to suffocate and soothe a cabbage, as well as a finale whose final two shots each run more than ten minutes.¹⁰^•⁹ Tsai himself described the film at Venice as containing "no music, no songs, no stripping, no sex, just Lee Kang-sheng's face."²

A digital turning point. Stray Dogs was the first feature film Tsai and his team shot with a digital camera, a significant change for a director who had always thought and created in film.¹¹ The screenplay is credited to Tung Cheng-yu, Tsai Ming-liang, and Song Peng-fei, with cinematography by Liao Pen-jung and Sung Wen-chung and sound by Duu-Chih Tu and Li Chi Kuo.¹²

Production in Taichung

Tsai located the film's principal setting at an old sugar factory district in Taichung with a large pond and century-old trees, which he chose after hearing about the site's secluded landscape; the Taichung City Government's Information Bureau supported the production as one of its key subsidy cases in 2012.¹³ Lee Kang-sheng later recalled that the cabbage scene was shot in a ruin within the city, a wasteland amid urban prosperity whose contrast he found striking.¹⁴

Release and reception

The film premiered in competition at Venice in September 2013 and went on to screen at Toronto, Busan, and the New York Film Festival, among others.¹^•¹⁵ At the 50th Golden Horse Awards it won Best Director and Best Leading Actor, and Lee also took Best Actor at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival and the 2014 Taipei Film Festival.⁵ The Ministry of Culture awarded Tsai NT$2.5 million at a press conference after the Venice win.¹⁶

Critics were broadly enthusiastic. The film holds a Metascore of 84, with 12 of 14 counted reviews positive and none negative, and reviews in The Telegraph, CineVue, and Slant Magazine scored it 100.⁶ Robbie Collin of The Telegraph wrote that "every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery."⁶ Reception was not uniform: Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called the film's mystery opaque and its near-catatonic register sometimes unrewarding, while still calling Tsai "a deeply serious and distinctive film-maker."¹⁷ Academic criticism has read the film as a social critique of Taipei as a neoliberal consumer city, achieved through sustained long takes that create what Louis Lo of National Yang-Ming University calls a cinema of contemplation.¹⁸

Tsai's announced farewell to features

At Venice, the 56-year-old Tsai announced that Stray Dogs would be his last feature film, saying he was tired of the theatrical release system and wanted to live rather than keep making features; he called it the most satisfying work of his career.² He explained that he could not make films for the system, saying "cinema as an object of consumption limits my creativity" and that slowness was for him a technique for finding a path through the disorientation of imposed speed.¹⁹ He did not stop making moving-image work: his 2019 documentary Your Face won the Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary, and he received the Pardo alla Carriera honor at Locarno in 2023.¹ The film's afterlife has also extended into museums, with screenings at MoMA in 2022 and gallery presentations, a trajectory Tsai had already noted when he said that art institutions had offered his films a new exhibition venue after poor theatrical box office.²⁰^•¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2010 to 2014 › Psychological and social drama films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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