Chang Yi
Richly illustrated with film clips and interviews, OUR TIME, OUR STORY tells the still-evolving story of the Taiwanese "new wave," from its rise in the early 1980s, as the island was democratizing after decades under martial law, through growing international recognition and domestic debate in the 1990s. Spearheaded in its early years by such filmmakers as Edward Yang, Ko I-cheng, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wan Jen, the movement revitalized Taiwan cinema through low-budget experiments that emphasized personal stories, political reflection and stylistic invention. Said filmmakers, writers and actors like Wu Nien-jen and Sylvia Chang, even "second wave" directors Tsai Ming-liang and Lin Cheng-sheng provide fond reminiscences and retrospective insights in this compelling account of one of the most distinctive national cinemas of the last quarter-century.
Three delinquent schoolchildren discover a group of sea turtles on the beach. They bring them into town to much consternation from the local adults
A housewife whose life only revolves her husband finds herself being cheated. She becomes angry and neurotic and can't accept the fact at all. Finally, she realizes that the only choice she has is to compromise and to forgive, but it was already too late.
A low-key film about a mother's relationship with her growing son. The middle-class Mrs. Pan lives in Taipei, is married to a mainlander, and has two children, her son Han-sheng and a younger daughter Han-lin
Arriving in Taiwan in the 1950s, Kuei-mei makes a disadvantageous marriage to a widower with three unruly kids and a bad gambling habit. Beautifully portrayed by celebrated actress Yang, she weathers pregnancies, her husband's infidelity, her daughter's resentment, a stint as servant in Japan, divorce, and illness while struggling to keep the family restaurant business afloat.
An Zhuo is a shy and polite teenager. His parents are very strict. In addition to normal classes, he has been supervised to learn English, Spanish and violin. Every day is full of classes. However, what he is really interested in is watching the sky with a telescope at night. One day, a super baby from outer space accidentally enters his world. Appears to be in the vein of E.T.
Made one year before the better-known omnibus film The Sandwich Man, In Our Time is the work that first announced the coming of the New Taiwan Cinema. Consisting of four segments, each set in different decades from the 1950s through the 1980s, and dealing with protagonists at different stages of life between childhood and young adulthood. Yang’s made his cinematic debut with the second segment, “Expectations,” the story of an adolescent girl in the 1960s whose life is given a jolt by the arrival of a slightly older male student as a lodger in her house. Taken as a whole, In Our Time announces the ambition of the New Taiwan Cinema: to eschew studio-bound escapism and melodrama in favor of a hard-hitting cinema grounded in everyday life. (Harvard Film Archive)
In 1945, Japan had surrendered but the news did not reach a small village in China. The local guerrilla force still put up a hilarious fight with the Japanese command.
