“Strange.. why are we afraid of the first time?? Every day in life is a first time. Every morning is new! We never live the same day twice. We’re never afraid of getting up every morning.
Why?”
Maybe this quote means nothing without the context, but I’m still gonna leave it there. Yi Yi is the GOAT. The first time I watched it, I knew I had just witnessed something special, but not this good. And I’m not ashamed about it…
Possibly the most life affirming film I have ever seen. I'll come back to Yi Yi when I find myself lost and need a guiding hand to help me find the beauty and love that is in this world, a love that is meant to find us all.
"Why is the world so different from what we thought it was? Now that you're awake and see it again... has it changed at all?"
Yi Yi is an epic like no other. There is no expensive chariot race sequence, no sweeping wide shots of sand dunes or grand finale battles, it simply documents the lives of a Taiwanese family through the lens of three generations, without wasting a single second.
Edward Yang captures daily life and events with such…
Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral, Yi Yi achieves a quiet intimacy as it follows individual members of a family over the course of its near three-hour running-time.
I think one of the reasons this film feels so candid is because of the unrestricted access we are given. The camera transports us around Taipei as the characters roam about: the mother's workplace, the father's workplace, Yang-Yang's school, the neighbor's apartment...always showing, never telling. And somehow there is…