Taiwan New Cinema

It's said to have begun in 1982, with an omnibus film made of four segments, each shot by a different young director. Long takes, actors who were close to amateurs, undramatic events. What these directors were doing was bringing the time of the film closer to the time of daily life. In 1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion in Venice — the first Taiwanese film to do so. The film dealt with the February 28 Incident. Martial law had only been lifted in 1987, so just two years later, an event that had long gone unspoken was made into a film that faced it directly. It's considered the first major dramatic feature to take on this subject. Edward Yang won the Best Director award at Cannes in 2000 for Yi Yi: A One and a Two. It became his last film.