| Nehal Mohsen |
Born in Chaochou, Pingtung, a southern county in Taiwan, Ang Lee graduated from the National Arts School in 1975. He completed his bachelor's degree in theater from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 1980. He then earned his Master of Fine Arts from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts where his thesis work, a 43-minute drama, Fine Line (1984), won NYU's Wasserman Award for Outstanding Direction.
Six years later, Ang Lee directed his first internationally acclaimed trilogy of films known as "Father Knows Best" trilogy. They are about the conflict between older Confucian family members and their children who live in the modern American society. The films are Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).
In 1995, Lee directed the British classic drama, Sense and Sensibility for which he won the Golden Bear and Golden Globe Awards.
In 1999, he assembled a team from USA, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Mainland China for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a wuxia genre film about ancient China's martial artists' adventures. It won four Academy Awards.
In 2003, Lee returned to Hollywood to direct Hulk, a film which grossed over US$ 245 at the box office.
In 2005, Lee directed a small-budget independent film based on Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-finalist short story, Brokeback Mountain. It showcased Lee's skills in probing the depths of the human heart and the film was critically acclaimed at major international film festivals and won Lee numerous Best Director and Best Picture awards worldwide.
His next film was Lust, Caution (2007) based on a short novel which depicts events that took place in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China, during World War II. Ang Lee was able to adapt and expand a simple, short story into a feature film which focused more on its characters' sophisticated layers of hidden, reserved emotions. The film won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2007 and Lee was chosen as the president of the jury of the Venice Film Festival 2009.
In 2012, Ang Lee directed the survival drama film, Life of Pi, in which Lee persuaded 20th Century Fox to invest US$ 120 in applying 3D special effects to depict the emotions and behavior of young Pi, a sole survivor of a freight crash going from India to Canada who questions the meaning of life while accompanied by an orangutan, a hyena, a wounded zebra and a Bengal tiger.
In 2013, he was selected as a member of the main competition jury at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
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