Cute Girl

Born on April 8, 1947 to a member of the Hakka ethnic minority in the Southern Guangdong Province of mainland China, Hou fled to Taiwan (Kaohsiung) with his parents at just two years of age to escape the civil war that followed in the wake of Mao Zedong’s 1949 revolution. A long-time movie fan, Hou studied film at the National Taiwan College of the Arts after his mandatory two year military service in 1969. After graduation in 1972 and a brief stint as a salesman, he embarked on a more traditional route to becoming a film maker than some of his contemporaries, working his way up through the studios and finally reaching assistant director and then screenwriter in the late 1970s (as well as being a director, he would go on to write Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (1985) and produce Zhang Yimou’s Raise The Red Lantern (1992).
In 1980, he finally got the chance to direct a feature film. And though the result, Cute Girl, a (necessarily) rather glossy and formulaic melodrama, made very little critical inroads (and certainly didn’t herald the talent and vision to come), it did allow Hou the opportunity to direct again. And it served to win him, as a young up-and-coming director, the chance to work on a project that would allow him to take advantage of newly relaxed censorship laws and make the kind of film that he hungered for. (Adam Bingham, Cinetext)