Mahjong is a game for four players, and the one who first collects winning sets of tiles wins. But the real game lies not in these rectangular pieces per se, but in deliberating what one already has and could afford to discard or how to acquire from others what one desires but does not yet […]

Characterized as “Yang’s most difficult, intellectually provocative, and structurally challenging film” (John Anderson), Edward Yang’s third feature-length film is a puzzle with immense reverberatory power. The Terrorizers depicts the intertwining of love and death among three different couples: a young photographer and his literary girlfriend; a middle-class and middle-aged married couple whose mutual estrangement grows to the […]

A renowned young pianist, Tan Ching-Ching (Terry Hu) comes back to Taipei for the first time in thirteen years to give a performance. An old friend, Lin Jia-li (Sylvia Chang), gets in touch with her to reconvene over an afternoon coffee. That Day, on the Beach takes place over a conversation between the two female friends, during […]

The omnibus film In Our Time initiated radical innovations in terms of aesthetic styles, industry practices and commonly depicted themes, thereby revolutionizing the filmmaking industry in Taiwan and inaugurating the movement of Taiwan New Cinema. The four segments are shot by four young emerging directors and each film—set in different decades from the 1950s to the 1980s—represents […]

Edward Yang’s cinematic swan song, released at the turn of the millennium, is a moving tapestry that weaves together the dissolution and reconstitution of the fragile subjectivities in an increasingly global, capitalist and mediated urban society. Yi Yi opens with a wedding and ends with a funeral. What unfolds between love and death is everything that saturates […]

Similar to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), A Brighter Summer Day also traces the experiences of a large family during a critical historical epoch in Taiwan. Set in the early 1960s, against the backdrop of a society witnessing the consequences of major demographic shifts and political oppression, this film depicts the difficult trials awaiting the simple and harmonious life […]