Yi Yi (2000, dir Edward Yang)

“My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.”“How can that be?”“It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.”

Yi Yi follows each member of a family in Tapei as they go through life’s quandaries and ask hard questions about the meaning of life. The film tackles childhood, love, friendship, family, mundanity, and life in the most simplistic way possible.

Minding the Gap (2018, dir Bing Liu)

“It [skateboarding] hurts you.” “Yeah, but so did my dad…and I loved him to death.”

Minding the Gap is a documentary about three lifelong friends that met while growing up skateboarding, the film focuses on their difficult home lives and the escape they all experience through skateboarding and spending time together.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021, dir Dean Fleischer-Camp)

"Guess what I do for adventure. I hang glide on a Dorito.”

Marcel is a one inch shell that gets separated from his sprawling community of shells. Now living alone with his grandmother Connie, a filmmaker finds Marcel and helps him reunite with his family through a short film.

Tokyo Story (1953, dir Yasujirō Ozu)

“You may be happy while you're still young. But as you become older, you'll find it lonely”.

A mother and father visit their adult children in Tokyo. Both of their children do not have a lot of free time to spend with their aging parents, and so Noriko the widow of their youngest son who was killed in the war keeps her in-laws company