A retrospective featuring the complete works of award-winning Taiwanese director Edward Yang (楊德昌) and an exhibition documenting the filmmaker’s creative process is to be held in Taipei from July 22 to Oct. 22.
The retrospective, which was put together with the help of Yang’s wife, Peng Kai-li (彭鎧立), is to be divided into two parts held at the National Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), the film institute in New Taipei City said in a press release on Tuesday.
An electrical engineer-turned-filmmaker, Yang was known for his perfectionism, completing only eight feature-length movies before his death from colorectal cancer in 2007 at the age of 59.
Photo courtesy of the National Film and Audiovisual Institute
Nevertheless, he was acclaimed as one of the most important figures in the Taiwan New Cinema movement during the 1980s, a breakthrough period that saw Taiwanese directors gain international recognition for the first time.
As part of the retrospective, the TFAI is to show Yang’s complete works, including Yi Yi (一一) from the director’s “Taipei Trilogy,” which tells the story of a family trying to come to terms with their past and present relationships.
Yang won best director at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2000 for Yi Yi and the film also ranked eighth on the BBC’s list of the 21st Century’s 100 greatest films.
The other two films in the trilogy, A Confucian Confusion (獨立時代) and Mahjong (麻將), are also being shown as part of the retrospective.
Other selected films include Golden Horse Awards best feature film winners A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件) and The Terrorizers (恐怖分子).
A Brighter Summer Day is based on a true story about a junior-high student from a middle-class family veering into juvenile delinquency, while The Terrorizers depicts the complex and dangerous love triangles revolving around two couples from different generations.
In addition to Yang’s works, the TFAI is to show a dozen movies that influenced the director, such as Nostalgia by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and L’Argent by French filmmaker Robert Bresson.
The three-month retrospective also includes an exhibition at the TFAM featuring tens of thousands of items left in the care of the national film institute by Peng in 2019, including Yang’s scripts, storyboards, letters, sketches and behind-the-scenes footage.
Following three years of study and curation, the items are to be shown to the public for the first time, providing a glimpse into the director’s unique cinematic world and creative process, the press release said.
Tickets to the movie screenings at the TFAI are available from July 12 for members and July 14 for other memebrs of the public, the release said.
Throughout the retrospective, a series of talks given by film critics, academics and screenwriters at home and abroad, as well as crew members who worked with Yang, are to be held at the TFAM, it said.
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