Tsai Ming-liang's 'Dust' Brings the Walker Series to Spain, Debuting in Venice Before San Sebastian

Tsai Ming-liang's slow-walking wanderer reaches Spain for the first time. Dust, the 11th film in his Walker series, screens at the Venice Film Festival on 8 September 2026 at 16:30, programmed in the Venice Open — Out of Competition section of Biennale Cinema 2026, before travelling to the San Sebastián Film Festival's Zabaltegi section (La Biennale di Venezia; San Sebastián Turismoa).

The film runs 80 minutes and stars Lee Kang-sheng, the actor who has been Tsai's creative partner for more than three decades (Variety). The San Sebastián programme lists the running time as 78 minutes in one entry and 80 in another — a minor discrepancy between festival catalogues that also appears between the Venice and San Sebastián listings (San Sebastián Film Festival). Spain and Taiwan share the co-production credit (San Sebastián Film Festival).

Producers are Vitrine Filmes and Homegreen Films, with backing from the Basque regional government's culture and language department, Taiwan's Public Television Service Foundation, and Tabakalera — the San Sebastián cultural centre that hosted the shoot during the summer of 2025 (Variety; San Sebastián Turismoa). Tsai scouted San Sebastián twice before settling on it as the location, having previously sent his walker through Taipei, Hong Kong, Kuching in Malaysia, Marseille, Tokyo, Taiwan's Yilan coast, Paris, and Washington, D.C., along with two shorts shot at a Yunlin exhibition space (Variety).

The Walker project began in 2012, but its roots go further back. Tsai traces it to a stage production more than a decade ago in which Lee's slow-walking performance left a lasting impression on the director (Variety). The series is built around a single recurring image: Lee Kang-sheng moving in near-stillness through unfamiliar cities, each instalment a study of one body against one place.

Venice is familiar ground for Tsai. His 1994 feature Vive L'Amour won the Golden Lion, the festival's top prize, establishing him as one of the leading voices of what became known as the Second New Wave of Taiwanese cinema (Variety). More than thirty years later, Dust brings him back to the Lido — the thin strip of land that houses the festival — with a project that has been accumulating installments for nearly half that span.

For audiences who have followed the Walker films, Dust extends a body of work that treats movement itself as subject matter. For newcomers, it is a self-contained 80-minute entry point: one man walking through a city, photographed with the patience that defines Tsai's cinema.