Mammoth Edward Yang retrospective launches at the Cinematheque to April 29
The series begins with A Confucian Confusion and includes both Yi Yi and the epic A Brighter Summer Day
Nine-year-old Jonathan Chang in Edward Yang’s final masterpiece, Yi Yi (2000).
Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Films of Edward Yang takes place at the Cinematheque from March 28 to April 29
HIS NAME IS spoken by cinephiles in reverent tones, yet Edward Yang was a filmmaker almost by accident, entering the field sideways in the early ’80s while pursuing a career in American tech. Yang’s work is emblematic of the Taiwan New Wave but is sui generis on its own terms. His best known film, 2000’s Yi Yi, tells the story of a middle-class family in Taipei, but contains the whole world inside its measured compositions and affecting melodrama.
That would be Yang’s last feature, winning him the best director prize at Cannes and a reputation that exceeded even that of his friend and sometime creative partner Hou Hsiao-hsien. Seven years later, Yang was dead from cancer, leaving behind a remarkable slate of unfinished projects including an animated film with Jackie Chan. Most of what he bequeathed has been gathered together for a stupendous retrospective at the Cinematheque, starting March 28 when UBC’s Dr. Helena Wu introduces the 1994 comedy A Confucian Confusion, followed immediately on March 29 by the film that competes with Yi Yi as Yang’s masterpiece, 1992’s A Brighter Summer Day.
A sprawling period teen crime epic clocking in at almost four hours (and openly influenced by Goodfellas and western pop culture), Yang’s movie takes its title from Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, which in turn gives the Cinematheque series its name, and reminds us that one of the real masters of the form might have ended up working for Microsoft in his adopted America if fate hadn’t intervened and corrected the course of history as the gods of cinema intended.
Both films receive multiple screenings into April, along with That Day, On the Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985), The Terrorizers (1986), and Mahjong (1996), with Yi Yi screening on April 1, 21, and 29. 
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