IFFI 2025 | Reliving Edward Yang’s restored masterpiece, ‘Yi Yi’

On the eve of my departure from IFFI this year, the queue for Yi Yi started snaking toward its restoration screening astatine the festival. My imaginativeness had started to suffer frames from the inertia of 5 consecutive days of festival scheduling.

INOX Panjim and Maquinez Hall had blurred into 1 extended corridor of screenings, rushed Q&As, and the perpetual WhatsApp chatter astir who’d walked retired of what. The 4K restoration of Edward Yang’s movie was my past screening earlier heading backmost to Delhi and its accustomed horrors, and arsenic overmuch arsenic I worship the thing, I was 1 poorly timed fade-to-black distant from passing retired successful my seat.

Three hours aboriginal I walked retired arsenic the past idiosyncratic to permission the venue. The field was bare successful a strangely theatrical way, with its banners stirring a little, information yawning by the gross and the entity implicit Panjim chill and indifferent. It felt surreal that aft sitting done 1 of the astir intensely live films I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing connected the large screen, a mates spellbound festival friends and I were abruptly reduced to a fewer bushed silhouettes crossing an bare courtyard erstwhile more. The melancholy of that infinitesimal acceptable the movie a small excessively well, for Yi Yi is astir however beingness keeps going successful small, unremarkable steps adjacent erstwhile thing tremendous has conscionable passed done you.

What made that lingering unreserved of emotions I’d felt backmost successful Goa consciousness particularly charged successful 2025 is where the movie sits now. A 4th period aft its release, Yi Yi is inactive a cornerstone of modern cinephile culture. In the 2022 Sight & Sound canvass of the top films of each time, it climbed into the critics’ apical hundred, tied astir the nineties alongside Parasite and Ugetsu arsenic 1 of the cardinal modern titles. Throughout 2025, the film’s restoration has been touring festivals and creation houses crossed the world, billed successful transcript arsenic “one of the large masterpieces of the twenty-first century”. 

Contemporary cinephilia is shaped by platforms and playlists. Letterboxd lists, Instagram recommendations, YouTube video essays, and Twitter messiahs that walk astir festival links similar contraband — each of these person made planetary creation cinema oddly accessible again. For younger cinephiles who discovered cinema connected streaming, the three-hour Taiwanese household play you log with trembling sincerity, is present a rite of passage. In that ecosystem, watching it astatine Goa plugged the festival straight into this larger, somewhat nerdy solemnisation of Yang’s legacy.

Part of the film’s enduring charm comes from however cleanly it cuts done the noise. We are presently surviving wrong an echo enclosure of propulsion notifications, situation headlines, clime dread, and the numbing churn of doomscrolling done brainrot; our large screens are dominated by worlds that reset themselves each fewer years, with caller actors and marque strategies; and our lives are being perpetually framed by beforehand cameras, information feeds, and “For You” pages — the specified suggestions of these insipid realities look truthful preposterously detached from the patient, fulfilling tenderness of Edward Yang’s world. Yi Yi looks astatine municipality beingness astatine the crook of the millennium and sees questions that person lone sharpened: What americium I doing each day? What bash I really remember?

Unlike the abstracted archetypal viewings of the movie connected my laptop, Min-Min’s breakdown present abruptly felt uncomfortably modern successful a acheronian theatre, snapping into absorption a peculiar benignant of modern situation I could person sworn chancing crossed my Twitter feed. Her confession that she has “so little” to archer her comatose parent astir her days felt portion of Yang’s galore damning prognostications connected productivity culture. The movie predates Outlook message notifications, Slack channels and Teams calls, but the sensations of a beingness flattened are the same. Min-Min’s situation is an indictment of however capitalism has trained america each to move, think, and forget.

The concern anxieties and resurrected romance of NJ’s storyline successful Tokyo, plays otherwise against today’s popular civilization arsenic well. We’re saturated with multiverse narratives wherever characters glimpse the roads not taken — Everything Everywhere All astatine Once adjacent turned that into a Best Picture-winning genre — but Yang’s mentation is smaller and harsher. There is lone the ache of 2 middle-aged radical realising that the past they mythologised was shaped by the aforesaid uncertainty that paralyses them now. It truly puts into position however overmuch modern cinema has been selling the spectacle of regret, but Yi Yi treats that fated edifice corridor wherever cipher says the nonstop happening they mean, arsenic thing granular and boring and truthful truer.

There was besides bully aged Yang-Yang, wandering astir with his camera similar a tiny archivist of quality unsighted spots, photographing the backs of people’s heads arsenic if he’s mapping the parts of our outsourced selves. Initially scoffed astatine by his lowbrow lout of a teacher, Yang-Yang’s iconography offers up the discomforts of not seeing yourself without relying connected idiosyncratic else’s vantage. And against a civilization terrified of relinquishing authorship implicit its ain image, the kid’s stubborn sincerity felt astir allegorical for the forgotten societal truths of clarity arsenic a collaborative act. Sitting successful the acheronian astatine Goa, surrounded by radical I’d apt ne'er talk to again, the thought landed harder than expected. Film festivals aft all, are impermanent societies built connected borrowed imaginativeness — for a fewer days, we fto the films and the strangers beside america lend america angles we’d ne'er find connected our own. 

The metropolis successful Yi Yi besides speaks fluently to 2025. Yang’s Taipei, with its solid facades, bureau grids, and overlapping reflections, anticipated the mode modern cities consciousness similar they’re everlastingly watching themselves. Delhi and Taipei are antithetic beasts, but walking backmost done Panjim’s mall-adjacent architecture aft the screening, I kept noticing however bodies were framed by solid and lit signage successful ways that Yang would person understood instinctively. His enactment belongs to the aforesaid wide municipality contented arsenic Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien, yet it present besides dialogues with an epoch threatening thing and everything with the promises of content.

Watching Yi Yi this twelvemonth besides meant watching it arsenic a Taiwanese movie astatine a clip erstwhile Taiwan sits perpetually successful the headlines. The land is framed successful think-tank reports arsenic the likeliest flashpoint successful US–China relations, and the past fewer weeks unsocial person seen Beijing informing it volition “crush” overseas interference. Against these anxieties, Yang’s soft, municipality melancholy for Taiwan is inactive defined by the interiority that Western capitalism has steadily eroded. Yang renders the architecture of entrapment arsenic the affectional fallout of an system pushed to reflector Western aspiration. In that sense, Yi Yi has besides go a counter-allegory to the island’s existent trajectory. It remembers a Taiwan whose worth wasn’t measured successful semiconductor output oregon strategical inferior but successful the simple, stubborn dignity of radical trying to recognize 1 different successful a satellite that rewards everything but that.

Cinephile civilization has folded each of this into a benignant of surviving mythology astir Yi Yi. On societal media, radical often gag astir redeeming it for “when I’m ready”. Poll essays and Substack newsletters speech astir it arsenic the definitive, “cinema of life”. It has go that uncommon movie which feels similar a flex of taste, but the acquisition of watching it tends to portion distant the pose. Which is wherefore watching it arsenic my farewell screening felt astir suspiciously well-timed. Festivals similar to merchantability themselves connected novelty and scarcity, yet I closed excavation with a movie that’s outlasted twenty-five years of sensation cycles and present sits person to the centre of the canon than fractional the buzzy premieres astir it, warring for relevance.

Walking retired into the hollowed-out festival complex, the show of a small snail making its red-carpet debut yet made maine recognize wherefore this generational classical ne'er runs dry.

Yi Yi restores the tiny things that exhaustion erases.

Yi Yi was screened astatine the 56th International Film Festival of India successful Goa