Retrospective Edward Yang

Since the invention of cinema, human life has been extended at least threefold.”

This iconic line from Edward Yang’s Yi Yi perfectly embodies the spirit of the retrospective and our festival L’heure d’été TAIPEI : inviting viewers to venture further, to discover other ways of life, and to share life experiences from elsewhere.

Following L’heure d’été TAIPEI, we have chosen to dedicate this program to Edward Yang, one of the greatest filmmakers of the Taiwanese New Wave. From Xiao Si, the young protagonist of A Brighter Summer Day, to Yang-Yang in Yi Yi, his films offer a remarkably keen insight into society, without ever losing the curiosity, sensitivity, and sense of wonder characteristic of childhood. They explore how we grow up, love, fail, and try to understand the world around us.

But this tenderness is always accompanied by a relentless lucidity. Edward Yang reveals the fractures of a rapidly changing society, where modernity is transforming human relationships. In A Confucian Confusion, he paints a portrait of an era in which everything—even feelings themselves—seems subject to the laws of the market, exposing the gradual commodification of human relations.

Born in 1947, Edward Yang lived through the upheavals that shaped 20th-century Taiwan. His childhood was marked by the aftermath of the war and profound political changes, before he left to study in the United States. When he returned to his homeland in the early 1980s to devote himself to filmmaking, Taiwan was experiencing an unprecedented economic growth. From this singular trajectory is born a body of work that, in observing the transformations of society, examines with profound humanity the hopes, contradictions, and disillusionments of modernity.