The Terrorizers

Edward Yang's widow, Kaili Peng, will introduce the November 22 screening, which will be followed by a reception open to all ticketholders.

Yang’s most narratively intricate and formally audacious film opens with an early-morning police shootout in which a Eurasian girl (known only as “the white chick”) is seen fleeing the scene through the lens of a young amateur photographer. Elsewhere in the city, blocked novelist Chou (Wayne Wang muse Cora Miao) unsuccessfully tries to elicit sympathy from her frosty husband, a lab technician whose sense of self-worth hinges on being chosen for an important promotion at work. Gradually, these enigmatic characters emerge in sharper relief—and converge in a series of dazzling and unexpected ways—while the line between reality and fiction blurs in the pages of Chou’s latest story. As complexly layered and self-reflexive as Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, The Terrorizers is at once Yang’s ultimate statement on the alienation of modern living and a road map through his own formidable creative process.

Screening with:
The Wind
Edward Yang, 2007, Taiwan, Digital, 6m
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 Yang’s lifelong love of graphic novels and his friendship with Jackie Chan. Though production on The Wind was halted by Yang’s death, this brief assembly of completed scenes offers a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been—and might, someday, still be.