I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

With films such as What Time Is It There?, Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang has built a reputation as one of the most influential filmmakers in contemporary cinema for his use of eloquent silences and absorbing long takes which allow different parts of the frame to come into play at surprising moments. This is a story about care-giving and the ways that, improbably, tenderness manages to survive in a world of environmental and emotional dislocation. A mattress and a wounded man are brought home by a group of Bangladeshis who are squatting in a disused Kuala Lumpur construction site, and the mattress proves to be no less important to the story than the man. Tsai is a master of creating spaces that we are invited to enter imaginatively to supply motivations, to round out the off-screen spaces and to momentarily marvel at the new ways of looking at images, and perhaps at new ways of seeing the world.

For years the foreigner in Taiwan, now he's filming foreigners in Malaysia, capturing their sense of being cut off from the society around them and making the intense sexual drive -- never love, but a need for companionship -- more meaningful.

Variety