The new Paris-set film The Flight of the Red Balloon has one of the odder background stories of recent films. It's the first movie directed in the West by the revered Taiwan-based filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and is the first of a projected series of movies to be funded by the Paris museum, the Musée d’Orsay. It was reportedly the museum's idea that Hsiao-hsien "remake" Albert Lamorisee's 1956 children's classic The Red Balloon, a short (thirty-four minute) film in which the brightly colored title prop magically follows a small boy through the city. It turned out that Hsiao-hsien had never seen it. The movie he wound up making uses the city and the figure of a small boy and the image of a mysterious red balloon as a kind of tribute to Lamorisee, but mostly as a sort of homage to unversally shared memory, and overlapping creative imagination.
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