General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

In Our Time (光阴的故事)

In Our Time (光陰的故事) is a 1982 Taiwanese anthology film produced by Central Motion Pictures (中影), in which four then-emerging directors, Tao Te-chen (陶德辰), Edward Yang (楊德昌), Ko I-chen (柯一正), and Chang Yi (張毅), each directed one short segment tracing a stage of life from childhood to adulthood. It is generally regarded as the starting point of the Taiwan New Cinema movement of the early 1980s.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	光陰的故事 (Guang yin de gu shi), English title In Our Time³
Release	Premiered in Taiwan on 28 August 1982; produced by Central Motion Pictures²^•⁴
Directors	Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, Chang Yi, each directing one segment¹
Segments	小龍頭 (Little Dragon Head), 指望 (Expectation), 跳蛙 (Leap Frog), 報上名來 (Say Your Name)¹
Structure	Four stages of life: elementary school, middle school, university, and working adulthood, set from the 1950s to the 1980s⁵^•⁶
Language and length	Mandarin and Taiwanese; runtime reported as 106 minutes by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and 110 to 111 minutes by other sources¹^•⁷^•⁸
Recognition	1982 Golden Horse Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress; widely cited as the beginning of Taiwan New Cinema¹

Spoilers

The four segments

The four stories are independent but linked by the theme of growing up, moving from the 1950s to the film's present.¹^•⁵

小龍頭 (Little Dragon Head), directed by Tao Te-chen, follows a shy, withdrawn elementary school boy absorbed in his dinosaur toys, whose only friend is a girl who later emigrates with her family to the United States, leaving him alone.⁵^•⁶
指望 (Expectation), directed by Edward Yang, is set in the early 1960s and depicts a teenage girl, played by Shih An-ni (石安妮), who develops a crush on the older university student renting a room in her single-parent household, then discovers that her older sister is already his lover.⁷^•¹³ It was Yang's first work made for theatrical release.⁷ Yang described the segment's focus on the helplessness of a girl's first menstruation as a deliberately rational treatment of emotional material, an interplay of feeling and reason intended to reach beyond lived experience.¹
跳蛙 (Leap Frog), directed by Ko I-chen, portrays university-age youth.¹
報上名來 (Say Your Name), directed by Chang Yi, follows a young married couple in the city, including a comic episode in which the husband, locked out of his apartment without his keys, is not recognized by a neighbor disputing the newspaper delivery.⁵

The cast included Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), Li Li-chun (李立群), Li Kuo-hsiu (李國修), and Chang Ying-chen (張盈真) in leading roles.⁴^•¹⁴

Production background

By the early 1980s the Taiwanese domestic film market had contracted, and Central Motion Pictures, the state-affiliated studio, responded in 1982 with a policy of "small budgets, refined production" (小成本、精製作) aimed at cultivating a new generation of filmmakers.⁹ Under studio general manager Ming Chi (明驥), the planners Hsiao Yeh (小野) and Wu Nien-jen (吳念真) recruited four young directors, Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, and Chang Yi, to make the film together.⁹^•¹⁰ Ko I-chen later recalled that he and Yang had already worked together in 1981 on the television anthology series Eleven Women (十一個女人), and that the success of that series led CMPC to commission In Our Time.¹¹^•²

The film opened across Taiwan on 28 August 1982, having begun shooting that June.²^•¹² Its own poster billed it as "the first publicly screened art film in the Republic of China in twenty years," and it performed well commercially, drawing audiences beyond expectations.⁴^•¹³

Place in Taiwan New Cinema

The film is conventionally dated as the origin of Taiwan New Cinema (台灣新電影), the movement of the early and mid-1980s in which directors including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang, Wan Jen, and Chang Yi renewed Taiwanese filmmaking with low-budget, realist films about ordinary life.¹³^•¹⁵ After In Our Time, CMPC continued the new-talent policy, bringing in Wan Jen and Chuang Hsiang (曾壯祥), promoting art director Wang Tung to director, and engaging Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chen Kun-hou; the following year The Sandwich Man (兒子的大玩偶, 1983) consolidated the movement.²^•¹³

Contemporary accounts credit the film with breaking the dominance of political propaganda pictures and Qiong Yao romances in the Taiwanese market, opening an era of realist films concerned with society and family life.¹⁰ Its significance is usually described as operating on several levels at once: institutionally, in promoting young directors outside studio convention; economically, in using low budgets to buy creative freedom; thematically, in establishing the movement's growth-and-memory subject matter and attention to local experience; and stylistically, in a plain, documentary-inflected image that departed from the staged melodrama of the preceding period.¹⁶

The movement's endpoint is less settled than its beginning: some accounts close it with the 1987 Taiwan Cinema Manifesto, signed by about fifty filmmakers and cultural figures in January 1987, while others take Hou's A City of Sadness winning the Golden Lion at Venice in 1989 as its culmination.¹⁷^•¹⁸

Later reception and restoration

The film received a Golden Horse Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1982, and was later shown in restored form at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2007, the Taipei Film Festival in 2012, and the Osaka Asian Film Festival in 2015.¹^•¹⁹ A 2K restoration by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute has circulated internationally, paired in some programs with Yang's unfinished final work The Wind.⁷

Yang's segment in particular has drawn sustained critical attention. Reviewers have singled out its treatment of an adolescent girl's awakening, its use of light and shadow, and its restraint, and it is regarded as a prototype for the finely observed period portraits of Yang's later career.²⁰^•⁷

A 2013 documentary about the movement, Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema, took the same Chinese title, 光陰的故事. Funded by Taipei City Government's Department of Cultural Affairs, it interviews directors, critics, and scholars across Europe, Asia, and the Americas about the movement's international influence, including filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Jia Zhangke.²¹^•¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released before 2000

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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