Yi YiMovies like Yi Yi
- Key Features:
- Existentialism, Family dynamics, Mid-life crisis, Spiritual crisis, Business ethics, Brotherhood, Marriage, Coming-of-age, Financial difficulties, Mortality, Taiwanese cinema, Character study, Contemplative, Slow burn
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Art house enthusiasts, Introspective viewers, Fans of Asian cinema, Those interested in family dramas
- Emotional Arc:
- Introspection → Melancholy
Yi Yi

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.
Yi Yi
A young woman urgently seeks to navigate the maze of contemporary Taipei and find a future. She hopes that her boyfriend Lung is the key to the future, but Lung is stuck in a past that combines baseball and traditional loyalty that leads him to squander his nest egg bailing her father out of financial trouble.

Three lonely young denizens of Taipei unknowingly share an apartment: May, a real estate agent who uses it for her sexual affairs; Ah-jung, her current lover; and Hsiao-kang, who's stolen the key and uses the apartment as a retreat.

Riko is an honest and hardworking man who can count on a group of real friends and a loving wife. Things change after he loses his job and experiences a midlife crisis.

The story of a family embroiled in the "White Terror," the Kuomintang government's anti-communist political repression that was wrought on the Taiwanese people from 1947-1987.

A street vendor with a grim home-life forges a connection with a young woman on her way to Paris.

An uncompromising look into urban life from the eyes of a voyeuristic photographer, a rebellious teenager, and a married couple teetering on the edge of adultery.

A story about a karaoke-addicted old woman struggling with her self-worth and a sense of betrayal at her long-lost husband's funeral where she encounters his younger and more sophisticated girlfriend while she finds out her kids might have been secretly in touch with her late husband all these years.

When Sanlian's ex-husband passes away, she discovers he has altered his insurance policy, cutting out their son in favor of a stranger named Jay.

A family of four fractures under the weight of unmet expectations, unexpected tragedy, and uncompromising pride.

A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

The relationship between a middle-aged man and the elderly woman who has been the family's helper for sixty years.

Retired and widowed Chinese master chef Chu lives in modern day Taipei, with his three attractive daughters, all of whom are unattached. Soon, each daughter encounters a new man in their lives. When these new relationships blossom, stereotypes are broken and the living situation within the family changes.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

A young American woman is sent by her parents to a cultural immersion program in Taipei where she begins a new journey of self-discovery and romance.

A group of performing art troupe members each face their own trials and tribulations in Chengdu; from escaping a family scandal to dealing with unrequited love, each experiences rejection that shapes their lives.

In the Chinese town of Fuyang, four brothers go about their day-to-day lives, their destinies shaped by love and challenges.

A debt-ridden wedding planner inadvertently becomes a successful funeral planner. However, he must convince a traditional Taoist priest of his legitimacy to continue operating in the field.

Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.

Kim Ji-young, an ordinary woman in her 30s, suddenly shows signs of being inhabited by other women from her life, past and present.

Wang Tiemei, a single mother, loses her job and moves, befriending neighbor Xiaoye who appears cheerful but is depressed. Their bond grows as Tiemei navigates relationships with her ex-husband causing trouble.

An autobiographical film based on Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's memories of his youth growing up in Taiwan after emigrating from mainland China.

The life of Tao, and those close to her, is explored in three different time periods: 1999, 2014, and 2025.

Wang Shicong, chairman of the famous group, died tragically at home. The prosecutor Liang Wenchao and his wife, Abang, learned during the investigation that the deceased’s long-term partner, Dr. Wan, and his ex-wife’s Son Wang Tianyou, young newlywed wife Li Yan, and even the dead ex-wife, each suspect has an intricate connection. As more clues gradually surfaced, they gradually discovered the rich. The amazing secret hidden behind the murder...

An alcoholic man and his two young children barely survive in Taipei. They cross paths with a lonely grocery clerk who might help them make a better life.

Vicky recalls her romances with her exes Hao Hao and Jack in the neon-lit clubs of Taipei.

Oki, a film student, gets involved in two relationships as she navigates the advances of a fellow student and grapples with her feelings for her much older professor.

Jérôme Varenne, a French financier, lives and works in Shanghai with Chen-Li, his life and business partner. One day, during a short stay in Paris, while paying a call to his mother, he is very displeased to learn from her and his hated brother, that the family house in Ambray is going to be sold. Jerome decides to go to the town where he grew up to see what is going on. Little does he know how eventful his escapade will be. Little does he know that it will change his life from soup to nuts...

A Japanese assassin stranded in Taiwan must take work from a local crime boss to make ends meet when suddenly a woman from his past delivers a son to him.

A family gathers together for a commemorative ritual whose nature only gradually becomes clear.

In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

Margherita, a director in the middle of an existential crisis, has to deal with the inevitable and still unacceptable loss of her mother.

A young woman, Janice, is living with her restrictive and conservative parents, who lead a dull working-class life and consider their daughter to be “misbehaving” whenever she’s trying to find her own way in life.

Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.

In the final days of the year 1999, almost everyone in Taiwan has died from a strange plague that ravished the island. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him.

Shenxiu has felt a deep sadness since her mother left. A storm plunges her into a dreamlike world of swirling colour. Led by the Hyjinx, and joined by inventive underwater chef Nanhe, she embarks on a quest to find solace in the Eye of the Deep Sea.

A boy experiences first love, friendships and injustices growing up in 1960s Taiwan.

A tragedy strikes a young woman's life without warning or reason. She continues living while searching for meaning in a lonely world.

An elderly couple journey to Tokyo to visit their grown children, only to find them preoccupied and self-involved.

A young man develops severe neck pain after swimming in a polluted river for a movie shoot, but nobody can provide him any relief.

Yueh-chen has an obsession with her classmate Shihao, but is too shy to confess to him directly. She sends in her best friend, Kerou, to act as a go-between, and Shihao ends up falling for Kerou, who is not sure what to think of him.

A South Korean woman in her sixties enrolls in a poetry class as she grapples with her faltering memory and her grandson's appalling wrongdoing.

Back from a professional trip to Paris, a neurologist at the pinnacle of his career has to pick up his wife so that they can attend a family meal to commemorate his father, who died a year before. At his mother's flat, the guests are waiting for the priest to arrive while arguing about all kinds of things connected and unconnected with the world’s events and wars.

On a dark and rainy night, a historic and regal Taipei cinema sees its final film: 1967 martial arts feature "Dragon Inn".

The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.

Tommaso is an American expat film director living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. Disoriented by his past misgivings and subsequent unexpected blows to his self-esteem, Tommaso wades through this late chapter of his life with an increasingly impaired grasp on reality as he prepares for his next film.

Madame Tang colludes and mediates between the government and the private businesses for the benefits of her all-female family. One case does not go according to plan, and an entire family close to Madame Tang fall victim to a gruesome murder. Ambition, desire and lust eventually change Tang's relationships with her own family forever.

When a wife becomes the breadwinner of her family after her husband loses his job, adultery becomes part of her life.

Irene, a workaholic, is forced to re-evaluate her priorities after the suicide of her two best friends.

An aspiring filmmaker visits his parents and begins to devise a movie. Amidst creating and casting for the film, he encounters with family & friends who struggle with their own problems, dreams and life.

The neurotic Fikret and tavern singer Solmaz, whose 21 year long relationships end on the same day, meet through a funny coincidence. When Solmaz's daughter Zeynep decides to marry her lover from Adana, the ever-fearful Fikret ends up having to play the role of his life. Intended at first to be kept in the family, the wedding becomes a much bigger event upon the insistence of the groom's relatives. Can our heroes come to terms with the traditional Adana family who carry guns and own a kebab restaurant chain, and see the wedding through without mishaps?

A criminal, a bank clerk and a police officer find their destinies entwined when a loan shark gets assaulted after having withdrawn $10 million from the bank in the midst of the world financial crisis.

After suffering from a heart attack, a wealthy elderly Russian man plans to will most of his estate to his estranged daughter, but his titular wife has other plans.

Sang-hyun is always struggling from debt, and Dong-soo works at a baby box facility. On a rainy night, they steal the baby Woo-sung, who was left in the baby box, to sell him at a good price. Meanwhile, detectives were watching, and they quietly track them down to capture the crucial evidence.

Sara and Nicola are married and in love. Their lives seem to be perfect: they have an angelic six-year-old daughter, thriving careers and a stable marriage. The birth of their second child, which disrupts the family balance, leads to tragicomic scenarios.

Ryota Nonomiya is a successful businessman driven by money. He learns that his biological son was switched with another child after birth. He must make a life-changing decision and choose his true son or the boy he raised as his own.

Four women in their thirties reevaluate their relationships, both shared and private, after a startling revelation concerning one's marriage forces each of them to ask one of life's biggest questions: "Am I who I want to be?"

An obsessive-compulsive Japanese librarian living in Bangkok spends most of his days contemplating suicide in his apartment. His life changes when he witnesses the death of a young girl and becomes acquainted with her elder sister.

When Eve, an interior designer, is deserted by her husband of many years, Arthur, the emotionally glacial relationships of the three grown-up daughters are laid bare. Twisted by jealousy, insecurity and resentment, Renata, a successful writer; Joey, a woman crippled by indecision; and Flyn, a budding actress; struggle to communicate for the sake of their shattered mother. But when their father unexpectedly falls for another woman, his decision to remarry sets in motion a terrible twist of fate…

In a city of love and prosperity, a city of lost hope and premature death, veteran detective Hei feels it all: the hurt, the helplessness, the horror. When his father-in-law, the billionaire benefactor Kim, is gruesomely murdered in his palatial mansion, he enlists the assistance of his former partner turned private detective.

Aydın is a hotel owner and a retired actor in rural Turkey. As winter emerges he begins navigating the conflicts within the relationships with his wife, sister and existence.

Areum sits in a small café, typing on her laptop. Around her, customers enact various dramas from their lives. Is she writing what she hears or is she hearing what's been written?

Somaieh, the youngest daughter of an indigent family, is getting married and fear is overwhelming each and every member of the family regarding how to overcome their difficulties after she's gone.

Women enter and exit a science fiction author's life over the course of a few years after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.

Year 1977, a September morning in Ankara... Yilmaz tries to rush his pregnant wife Neriman to the hospital and he crushes into Omer's car. This accident causes Omer's pregnant wife Inci, who was in the back seat, to have a pre-term labor. The babies are born on the same day. They see each other for the first time... This accident is the threshold of the coincidences that bring Ozgur and Deniz together.

In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.

In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.

After living 45 years in Germany, the Turkish Hüseyin Yilmaz, seventy, announces to his family that he has bought a house in Turkey and they should return to make the necessary reforms. The idea is unwelcome and causes very heated discussions. In addition, Canan, a granddaughter of Hüseyin, announces she is pregnant and the father is her English boyfriend, and no one knew anything.

Mr. Chu is an elderly widower who teaches tai chi chuan in Beijing. He moves to America to live with his son's family, but finds the cultural adjustment difficult. Since his daughter-in-law is a white woman who does not speak Chinese, Mr. Chu's son, Alex, must mediate.

A restless photographer leaves her family to "find herself" and takes up deep-sea diving.

It's a story of 29-year-old top-manager Max who is really sure he is absolutely successful. All his life is around earning and spending money. But one day he meet a girl who is from another, real, world. And his own world starts to crash down.

A man remembers his childhood memory of growing up with an annoying little sister in 1990s China. How would his life have been if things had gone differently?

A young man of Chinese-Cambodian descent dies, leaving behind his isolated mother and his lover of four years. Though the two don't share a language, they grow close through their grief.

Ma Chenggang, a wealthy man in Xihong City, worries that his eldest son is too spoiled to succeed him. Determined to raise a capable successor, he takes an unconventional approach. They conceal their wealth, moving the family to a dilapidated neighborhood, and maintain an illusion of poverty, so that his son could develop qualities such as hard work, knowledge, careful budgeting, physical fitness, and perseverance.

Joseph and his two sons, Joachim and Ivan, form a close-knit family but fail to see that each one is losing control of his life. Joachim is supposed to be studying psychiatry but spends most of his time daydreaming about his ex-girlfriend, Ivan cannot fit in at school despite being very smart, and Joseph has secretly quit his job as a doctor and is trying to become a writer. While there is plenty of affection at home, all three are also, clumsily, searching for love...

High school teacher Cheng looks back to his repressed childhood memories, as he finds an anonymous suicide note in the classroom. He strives hard to prevent another tragedy from happening, meanwhile facing a series of family problems, his wife is divorcing him, and his father is dying.

"The Family," an album with a velvet cover, is meant to touch the extended family of man. Formal portraits, bookends in this 80-year saga, enclose the central story, which opens with the baptism of Carlo, a baby in his grandfather's lap, and ends with Carlo as a grandfather with a baby in his arms. And never once do we get out of the house, whose rooms provide the film's structure. Comfort or passion? Carlo couldn't really decide until it was too late.

When his girlfriend leaves for New York City on a 3-month-long internship, a strongly opinionated Berkeley arthouse movie theater manager begins exploring life as a bachelor.

Inspired by the true story of a family who believed they were possessed by spirits. This film follows a woman who must protect her child from a curse.

A debt collector strikes a deal with a debt-ridden woman struggling to care for her ailing father: he will take care of her bills if she agrees to date him.

Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot accept the fact that she was abandoned as a child.

These intertwining stories about romance and separation follow a firefighter who can't find the right time to propose, a shy theme park worker who falls for an artist, an estranged mother and son, and a man seeking to regain his lost love.

After having to quarantine together during COVID-19, a mother and daughter are forced to confront their personal obstacles and relationship tensions.

A young scholar named Yangsheng who gets married to the beautiful daughter of a local merchant. When their sex life proves unsatisfactory, Yangsheng leaves home and journeys to the Pavilion of Ultimate Bliss.

Three high school students experience the perks and pitfalls of love in director Leste Chen’s sensitive tale of friendship and yearning.

Follows the life of a young woman who has become reserved and indifferent to the world as a result of her chronic illness deformed hand and quietly portrays the unconventional, yet endearing relationship between mother and daughter as well as the development of Min-ah as she is befriended by the high spirited and carefree photographer Young-jae who moves into their apartment complex.

A drifter lives in people's houses while they are away and repays them by doing chores for them. His life changes when he meets a beautiful woman who wants to escape her unhappy marriage.

A young boy takes interest in piano while his family begins to disintegrate around him after his father loses his job.

Wataru Hirayama's outwardly liberal views on marriage are severely tested when his daughter declares that she is in love with a coworker and is adamant to live life her own way, instead of agreeing to an arranged marriage. Outwitted by his female relatives, Hirayama stubbornly refuses to admit defeat.

Seo-jin is a widower still grieving his wife's death. Then he receives the news that his long-lost younger sister, Yoo-jin, who went missing 25 years ago, has turned up. Unlike the rest of his family, who welcome her into their arms, Seo-jin feels that Yoo-jin is a stranger.

As a young New York couple goes from college romance to marriage and the birth of their first child, the unexpected twists of their journey create reverberations that echo over continents and through lifetimes.

Three men living in the Eastern most island of China go on a road trip to the Western most end of the country, and facing crises of love, friendship, and faith on their journey to the West.

Life has not been kind to drinking buddies Sam, Fai, and Mok as they struggle to make ends meet, until one stormy evening a mysterious old man appears before them in a bar with a 'get rich quick' scheme: an ancient treasure is buried under a high-security government building.

A family decides to buy a lodge in a remote hiking area. Their first customer commits suicide and the distraught family buries his body to avoid the bad publicity. But their luck gets worse, the bodies start piling up, and the family becomes frantic to rectify the situation.

A love story between a poor man and a rich girl. The rich girl's father tries to prevent their marriage and he declares a war against the poor boy's family.

A robbery leaves a proprietor penniless before his wedding, but becoming a son-in-law to a second family might be the financial solution he needs.

A story centered around a divorced couple living in a southern Chinese city Shenzhen and dealing with the disappearance of their missing son.

Damien is a professor of Chinese civilization who lives with his wife, Iva, a theater director, and their son Noé. Their love is mired in a mountain of routine and disenchantment. To help keep Zorica from getting deported, Iva gets Damien to promise he’ll go to his father, a state department official, for help. But Damien and his father have a distant and cool relationship. And this mission is a risky business which will send Damien spiraling downward and over the edge...

A group of close friends who attend a private school all have a debilitating crush on the sunny star pupil, Shen Chia-yi. The only member of the group who claims not to is Ko Ching-teng, but he ends up loving her as well.

