I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Acclaimed Taiwanese-Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang returns with his muse and star Lee Kang-sheng in this romantic drama about loneliness, love and abuse in Kuala Lumpur.

The mattress becomes the object of converging desires, plots and dreams in one of Tsai Ming-liang’s most hypnotic works. We see Lee Kang-sheng play two different characters in parallel narratives: in one, he is a homeless migrant being devotedly nursed back to health following a beating, and in the other, he is a paralysed man in a coma. What follows is a tangled web of loneliness and desire, care and abuse presented with Tsai’s trademark ‘slow cinema’ approach.

The first film Tsai shot in the country of his birth, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone was initially banned in Malaysia for its negative depiction of Kuala Lumpur and its residents.