Film industry workers yesterday mourned the death of Cannes-winning director Edward Yang (
Yang died at his Beverly Hills home last Friday after battling colon cancer for seven years.
He produced eight widely acclaimed films in a career spanning two decades.
His last movie, Yi Yi, about a family that copes with the serious illness of their elderly mother, won him the best director award at Cannes in 2000 but was never shown in Taiwan.
"His passing away marked the end of a glorious era [for Taiwan's film industry]," scriptwriter Hsiao Yeh (小野) told CTI Cable News.
"Our era may have really ended with [Yang's] passing away," director Hou Hsiao-hsien (
Hou and Yang created the "new wave" of Taiwanese films in the 1980s -- movies that won international acclaim for portraying Taiwan at a time of social and political transition.
Yang's films include A Brighter Summer Day, Taipei Story and A Confucian Confusion.
"His death is a great loss to our film industry," film critic Huang Chien-yeh (
Yang had expressed dissatisfaction with Taiwan's film scene and complained that the government subsidized films to serve political purposes.
Government Information Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉) had asked a press official at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles to convey his condolences to family members of Yang, an official said on Sunday.
The anonymous official said the Government Information Office was seeking opinions from leaders in the movie industry on how to honor Yang for his contribution to Taiwanese arts and culture.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
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