Taiwan-based Malaysian filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang will shoot the eleventh film in his Walker series in Spain. Filming begins this Friday 12 September, in industrial areas, urban outskirts and natural settings in San Sebastián, Pasajes, Irún, Mount Igeldo and the Chillida Leku museum. 

Once again, the monk played by Lee Kang-Sheng will walk – this time in Spain. It will be the eleventh film in the Walker series, a project that began in 2012. The monk's journey allows us to record the everyday uses of the territory, as well as its ways of inhabiting and observing. The result is a walking meditation and a reflection for the audience. The travelling figure is inspired by Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk from the Tang dynasty who travelled thousands of kilometres on foot between China and India.

Tsai Ming-Liang, a key director of the Taiwanese second new wave, premiered his debut film Rebels of the Neon God at the 1992 Berlinale. His second feature film, Vive l'amour (1994), won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, where he later received the Grand Jury Prize in 2013 for Stray Dogs [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]. With The River (1996), he won the Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale, where in 2005 he also received a Silver Bear for artistic contribution and the Alfred Bauer Prize for The Wayward Cloud.

The Walker series began in 2012 with the short film No Form, followed by four other shorts leading up to the medium-length film Journey to the West, in 2014, a France–Taiwan co-production shot in Marseille that featured the collaboration of French actor Denis Lavant. This was followed by the medium-length No No Sleep, filmed in Tokyo, and the first feature film in the series, Sand. He later directed Where and Abiding Nowhere in the same format, co-produced with the United States, shot in Washington D.C. and premiered at last year's Berlinale.

As for the decision to shoot on the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish production company Vitrine Filmes says that Tsai Ming-Liang's walkers are located in different cities around the world, and that the company already had a link with him as the distributor of his previous films in Spain. They invited the director to consider San Sebastián as the setting for his next film. After visiting the Basque city in June, Tsai Ming-Liang found both locations and people that confirmed that the Basque Country as the protagonist's next stop.

The film, currently titled Walker: Spain, is a production by Vitrine Filmes and Taiwanese company Homegreen Films, with support from the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation (TBD) and Tabakalera.