Ang Lee

Ang Lee, born on October 23, 1954, in Taiwan, is a filmmaker whose work often delves into emotional depth and the tensions of unspoken or suppressed feelings. He stands alone as the only director to have won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival twice, and he is among just four filmmakers to have claimed the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival twice. In 2020, he was honored with the BAFTA Fellowship.

Lee grew up in a military dependents' village in Pingtung County, Taiwan, as part of a waishengren family that had relocated from Jiangxi after the Chinese Civil War. His father, a school principal, emphasized education, but Lee failed the national university entrance exam twice before enrolling at what is now the National Taiwan University of Arts, graduating in 1975. A pivotal moment came when he saw Ingmar Bergman's *The Virgin Spring*, which sparked his interest in performance art. After completing military service, he moved to the United States in 1979, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1980. There, he met his future wife, Jane Lin, a fellow Taiwanese student. He then pursued a Master of Fine Arts in film production at New York University, where he was a classmate of Spike Lee and worked on his thesis film. His own thesis, *Fine Line*, won NYU's Wasserman Award for Outstanding Direction.

After graduating in 1985, Lee struggled to find work, spending several years unemployed while writing screenplays with his wife's support. In 1990, his screenplays *Pushing Hands* and *The Wedding Banquet* took first and second place in a competition sponsored by Taiwan's Government Information Office. This caught the attention of producer Hsu Li-kong, who invited Lee to direct *Pushing Hands*, released in 1991. That film, along with *The Wedding Banquet* (1993) and *Eat Drink Man Woman* (1994), formed the "Father Knows Best" trilogy, which explored conflicts between tradition and modernity, and Eastern and Western values. *The Wedding Banquet* won the Golden Bear and was nominated for both the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Lee's Hollywood breakthrough came with *Sense and Sensibility* (1995), his first English-language film. He followed with *The Ice Storm* (1997), *Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon* (2000), *Brokeback Mountain* (2005), *Lust, Caution* (200