Yang’s close friend, master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, delivers a remarkable lead performance as a former Little League baseball star faced with an empty future and painfully nostalgic for his childhood success. Hou’s character is caught in the complex grid of obligatory and accidental relationships traced by Yang against the backdrop of Taipei’s first economic awakening. While the film’s English-language title (assigned by Yang himself) deliberately echoes Ozu, its restrained exploration of urban malaise is better compared to Antonioni. What Taipei Story has in common with both Ozu and Antonioni is a concern for the moral and intellectual lassitude and pervasive disillusionment that gradually takes hold in the wake of an economic boom.

Immediately following Yi Yi’s unexpected success, Yang abruptly turned in a radically new direction, guided by his lifelong passion for graphic novels and drawing. Working in close collaboration with Jackie Chan, Yang dedicated himself to an animated martial arts film, The Wind, which was left incomplete at the time of his death from cancer last year. Although The Wind was only in the early stages of production, completed excerpts have been gathered for this presentation by Yang’s wife, Kaili Peng, who will be present to explain this fascinating project.