In Our Time is a portmanteau film, consisting of four films by four different directors. It represented a bold experiment in film-making, towards a truly national cinema, socially, culturally and linguistically aware of the unique Taiwanese situation. The directors were trained in film school rather than through the studio system, and most of the actors were non-professional.
The second segment, Expectation, was directed by the then unknown Edward Yang. The main protagonist in this tale is a young adolescent girl, who lives with her older sister and widowed mother. One of her friends is a small, bespectacled boy, but her family takes on a male student as a lodger…
