In Our Time + The Wind

Spanning different points of history (from the 1960s to the then-present) and stages of youth with an uncommonly realist aesthetic for its era, the anthology film In Our Time revitalized Taiwanese narrative cinema in the 1980s and established a break from decades of rigidly conservative movies entrenched in the local industry. Yang’s first work made for theatrical release, Expectations, is the anthology’s second short, a plangent snapshot of the early 1960s and a teenage girl’s sexual awakening as she pines for the older university student boarding with her family. Capturing the end of adolescence—and a world on the cusp of ominous change—through the smallest nuances of atmosphere and performance, Expectations is a prototype for the exquisite etchings of a time and place that would preoccupy Yang’s body of work. 2K restoration courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute.

Screening with:
The Wind
Edward Yang, 2002–2005, Taiwan, 7m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Of the many unrealized projects Yang developed in the wake of Yi Yi, the one that came the closest to fruition was an ambitious animated martial arts movie inspired by his lifelong love of graphic novels and his friendship with Jackie Chan. Though production on The Wind was halted after Yang’s death, this brief assembly of completed scenes offers a glimpse of what might have been. Courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute