Yi Yi brought Yang the Best Director award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and the film has been celebrated equally by mainstream critics and more stringent highbrow critics. The National Society of Film Critics awarded it Best Picture, and a Village Voice poll of 54 critics placed Yi Yi in second place after Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 2000) among the films of last year. Despite high acclaim for Yang’s previous pictures, Yi Yi is shockingly the first of Yang’s seven films to get a commercial run in the United States, and tiny distributor Winstar is barely up to the task. Without the marketing power of a major studio, Yi Yi is the kind of film that goes completely under the radar of the Academy Awards, while making all of the Best Picture nominees look feeble in comparison. Its appeal on all levels lies in its eminently accessible subject matter, the sophisticated approach taken to it, and Yang’s formidable directorial prowess. Alongside his compatriot, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang has become the most distinguished purveyor of the long take-long shot style, matching such masters as Theo Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky.