Edward Yang

Edward Yang is often cited, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien, as one of the central figures of New Taiwan Cinema. Born in Shanghai, he moved with his family at the age of two to Taiwan. After studying engineering in Taiwan, he received an advanced degree in computer science in Florida, before entering USC's film school in 1974. Yang left before graduating, but never gave up the idea of making films, even after taking a computer job in Seattle. In 1980, when a friend from USC asked him to write a screenplay for "The Winter of 1905," he went to Japan for the shoot, then returned to Taiwan in 1981, an opportune time for a budding filmmaker. Almost immediately, he directed "Duckweed" (1981), an episode from the groundbreaking TV series "11 Women." The following year, he was one of four young filmmakers to participate in "In Our Time" (1983), the film which inaugurated the new cinema. It introduced important new directors and represented what Yang considered the first attempt to recover the Taiwanese past, to "open up questions about our origins, our politics, our relationship to Mainland China."