Golden Horse Award-winning Taiwan film director Yang Wen-gan passed away peacefully Aug. 1 at the age of 87 at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, leaving behind a rich legacy of feature and documentary films.
Yang worked at Taiwan Film Culture Co. as a director of newsreels in the days when short documentaries provided people with their staple diet of news. This work gave him the sound technical grounding he later put to good effect in documentaries and feature films.
The documentary Yang produced about the Aug. 7, 1959, floods caused by Typhoon Ellen took several years to complete. It was the first to show the full extent of the disaster that claimed 669 lives with 377 missing. The film earned him the reputation as the father of Taiwan documentary.
Depicting the rigors of life on the nation’s tea plantations, “Lungching Township” won him the best documentary at the Golden Horse Awards and Asian Film Festival in 1969.
That same year, Yang’s legendary comedy “Gaining Sons, Not Losing Daughters” bagged four awards for best feature film, best screenwriter, best color cinematography and best supporting actress. In addition, the film on agricultural reform broke new ground with many of the shots filmed outdoors instead of in the studio, sparking a trend toward realism in local movies.
Yang's “Call of the Mountain” is considered a typical work of local realism. It gave local stars Chang Mei-yao and Ko Chun-hsiung their first big break, but location shooting was not without its costs for the director. During one scene, he fell out of the helicopter from which he was shooting and into a ravine, injuring himself.
The filmmaker's talents were also recognized by late President Chiang Kai-shek and former President Lee Teng-hui. In Yang's later years, he suffered from diabetes and prostate cancer. (SSC-SDH)
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