(Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan 2000, 173 min., 35mm, Mandarin, Min Nan, Hokkien, Japanese, and French with English subtitles)
Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, this intimate epic of family life is an exhilarating cornucopia of memorable characters. A child gets a still camera to photograph the back of people's heads to show "the half that we can't see"; a middle-aged man stumbles upon the first woman he loved and questions his own ideal of happiness; a girl undergoes her first crush and has no idea how to handle it. It looks like soap opera stuff, but you'll watch it as if it were a thriller! Edward Yang brings his brilliant non-professional cast to a performance whose freshness and warmth gives us the most emotionally direct cinema we have seen in years.