Hou directed 18 feature films during his career, and to mark his retirement we take a moment to rank his 10 finest works.

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10. The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982)

Hou’s third and final collaboration with Kenny Bee casts the Hong Kong singer as a university-educated teacher who transfers from Taipei to a small village in southern Taiwan.

Representative of a new generation of educators, the young man becomes an ambassador for moral and cultural advancement in the community.

This transitional film within Hou’s oeuvre sees him moving away from his early commercial ventures to document a society in transition, and works best in its portrayal of simple village life, especially the playful antics of three mischievous scamps dubbed the Three Musketeers.

9. Millennium Mambo (2001)

Hou’s first collaboration with actress Shu Qi is a freewheeling, aurally audacious romance that follows a young woman as she reminisces about her past relationships with two questionable lovers.

The third-person narration only adds to the enigmatic mystique of Vicky (Shu), a hostess at a trendy bar who becomes involved first with volatile wannabe DJ Hou-Hou (Tuan Chun-hao) and later a dubious older gangster (Jack Kao Jie).

Echoing the disorientation and uncertainty faced by many at the dawn of the new millennium, the film strikes a surprisingly youthful and contemporary tone given Hou’s preoccupations as a filmmaker had previously been rooted in the past.

8. Dust in the Wind (1986)

Hou’s first collaboration with screenwriter Wu Nien-jen is based largely on the latter’s own experiences growing up in the 1970s.

It follows a pair of high-school sweethearts, played by Wang Chien-wen and Hou regular Hsin Shu-fen, as they leave their small mining town and head to Taipei in search of work.

Bringing social issues to the fore, including the military draft, corrupt mine owners, as well as urban migration, this remains one of Hou’s most popular films.

It also features celebrated puppeteer Li Tian-lu, whose life Hou would go on to dramatise in 1993’s The Puppeteer.

7. The Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

In a notable stylistic departure, Hou’s dreamlike tale of high-end prostitutes in 19th century China features no exteriors, and was shot entirely on sets in Taiwan after the production was rejected by Chinese censors.

6. The Boys from Fengkuei (1983)

In this film, Hou starts to hone the signature style that would propel him to the forefront of the Taiwan New Wave movement.

Employing long takes and a notable absence of close-ups, Hou’s naturalistic aesthetic comes of age far more smoothly than his young protagonists, a rag-tag trio of teenage delinquents who move to the port city of Kaohsiung in search of work.

Chief among them is Ah-Ching (played by future filmmaker Doze Niu), who falls for his neighbour’s girlfriend while adjusting to city life with the ever-present threat of being drafted into the military.

5. A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984)

Over the summer the children become entangled in myriad misadventures, only half-aware of the more serious events affecting the adults around them.

4. The Puppetmaster (1993)

Through voice-over narration and a series of on-screen anecdotes, veteran glove puppeteer Li Tian-lu recounts his fascinating life through the decades when Taiwan was under Japanese occupation.

Hou stages beautifully detailed re-enactments of Li’s experiences, from his birth in 1909 to the end of the second world war, when he faces both personal and professional crises, from family dramas to being coerced into performing propaganda plays for the Japanese.

Hou interweaves a number of entrancing performances of traditional puppetry, which serve as a poignant metaphor for the profound identity crisis that dominated Taiwan in the 20th century.

3. The Assassin (2015)

In what now looks certain to be his final film, Hou turned his hand to the wuxia genre, putting his signature spin on the traditional martial arts drama.

Shu Qi, in her third collaboration with the director, is mesmerising in the lead role as a legendary female assassin who, as punishment for failing to follow through with a contract, is ordered to kill her own cousin (Chang Chen), to whom she was betrothed years earlier.

2. A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985)

Hou provides the voice-over narration himself for this autobiographical retelling of his formative years growing up in a family of immigrants from mainland China in his home district of Fengshan.

As he blossoms from a precocious youngster into a rebellious teen, and finally into a more thoughtful young man, “Ah-Hsiao” must contend with a widening cultural divide between his generation, raised in Taiwan, and his elderly relatives.

With the suggestion of war always kept to the periphery, Hou instead focuses on more immediate struggles, be they romantic, filial or otherwise in this beautiful, absorbing drama.

1. A City of Sadness (1989)

Shortly after the end of martial law, Hou delivered his magnum opus, an epic portrait of a single family from the coastal town of Jiufen as they become embroiled in the horrors of the White Terror regime of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.

In what was the first film to overtly address the February 28 anti-government uprising of 1947 and the massacre that followed, Hou’s camera remains diligently trained on the Lin family, in particular deaf-mute fourth son Wen-ching, played by Tony Leung in one of his first major leading roles.

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What unfolds is a crime saga unlike any other, where the drama and violence remain largely off screen, the camera instead concentrating on the repercussions of this tumultuous period within the household.

When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, A City of Sadness was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film, the festival’s top honour.