Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain Gallops Through Venice

The films of Ang Lee--including The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--earned the director recognition at three of the world's most significant film forums--the film festivals at Berlin and Cannes, and the Oscars. This year, for the first time, Lee entered a film, Brokeback Mountain, to the Venice Film Festival and walked away with the top prize. This award makes Lee the third Taiwanese director to take the Golden Lion for best picture at Venice, following Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1989 win for City of Sadness and Tsai Ming-liang's 1994 win for Vive L'amour.

The fifty-year-old Lee's early career was far from smooth. His father, Lee Sheng, then-principal of National Tainan First Senior High School, came from a long scholarly tradition and strongly opposed his son's turn toward drama. After graduating from National Taiwan Academy of Arts' Film and Drama Department, Ang Lee traveled to America for further study, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater at the University of Illinois and a Master of Fine Arts degree in film production from New York University. After this, Lee's talents remained unrecognized for another six years as he stayed at home as a househusband.

1990 proved to be a turning point in Lee's journey into the world of film. He finished two scripts during this quiet period--Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet--both of which won awards in the Government Information Office's national script competition. He also earned the patronage of Hsu Li-kung, then-vice president of the Central Motion Picture Corporation, which set him on the path of directing. Lee's first film, Pushing Hands, won Best Film at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival and The Wedding Banquet, his second, took the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1993. In 1996 Lee earned his second Berlin award and the Golden Globe for Best Director for his adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel Sense and Sensibility. Then The Ice Storm took the Best Screenplay at Cannes in 1997. Over the years he has tackled a range of themes and worked with a variety of people, and already in his early career he had shown a flexibility and artistry beyond the norm.

In 2000, Lee completed a movie set against the backdrop of traditional Chinese wuxia (martial arts-chivalry) stories, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film was a multinational effort, and earned massive box office takings and tremendous critical acclaim, winning four Oscars--Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, and Best Music, Original Score--and stirring up a storm of demand for kung fu movies around the world.

Critics generally recognize the unique character of Ang Lee's films, which is an undercurrent of repressed emotion and a poetic, emotive cinematic style. Brokeback Mountain, which took the award at Venice, is Lee's ninth production, and represents his return to independent production after the Hollywood collaborations of recent years. The film tells the story of a pair of cowboys who meet and fall in love in 1960s America and how, despite society's pressures to marry and raise families, the two support and care for each other through a 20-year-long gay relationship. This is Lee's second film, after The Wedding Banquet, to address the subject of homosexuality.

For being able to shake off the shackles of commercialism and film Brokeback Mountain independently, Lee gave special thanks to his late father, Lee Sheng. In an emotional speech, Lee told of how after completing Hulk he was feeling exhausted, physically and emotionally, and was considering giving up film. However, his father, who had long been opposed to his choice of career and was at that time facing his final days, encouraged him, telling him to "suit up and continue the fight." It was these words that gave him the strength to continue.