HUFF: YI YI - 10/8 KL. 19:00

A big, big film, about a few of us and all of us at the same time

Yi Yi is a film about a family in Taipei. This is an oversimplification. Yi Yi is a film where old loves emerge from their hiding places while new ones flare up; where life wisdom is dispensed on a business trip funded by a failing company; where they hold grandmother's hand and talk to her in the hope that she can hear, even in her coma; where people walk to and from each other, where they live and die. This is also, of course, an oversimplification.

Summarising everything that "happens" in Yi Yi is impossible, at least within the 200 words Cinemateket's programme texts are limited to. The film, directed and written by Edward Yang and described as a masterpiece already at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, manages to be both universal and personal. He paints this Taiwanese family and all the characters they meet with a deeply humanistic eye, and you would have to be blindfolded not to see yourself in some of them.

Why did I choose this film? I have been hyperbolic in all my previous programme texts, but this time I actually mean it. Yi Yi is the film we should show to aliens to convince them not to wipe us out. - Magnus O, board member of HUFF

The texts for the films shown in the theme series HUFF are written by the young curators who make up the board of HUFF.

Film info

Running time: 2h 53min

Produced: Taiwan, 2000

Original title: Yi yi

Director: Edward Yang

Audio: Mandarin Chinese

Subtitles: Norwegian

Age rating: 9 years

Screening format: 35mm