My next film project will be Edward Yang’s 2000 masterpiece “Yi Yi,” a movie that I’ve seen four times that gets richer and deeper — while feeling shorter — every time I watch it.

“Yi Yi” can seem intimidating at first glance. It’s a nearly three hour movie, and it has a very large set of characters. So there are some things that are important to keep in mind as we work our way through this film.

First, “Yi Yi” is a family melodrama. There isn’t a main character in “Yi Yi,” just a shifting constellation of characters in a family who all take up part of our attention. Because the movie concerns characters ranging from 8 years old to a very elderly woman, it takes up the entire span of human existence. There’s even a baby born during the film.

There are also many ceremonies, starting with a wedding, moving on to a bizarre and hilarious baby shower sequence, and ending with a funeral. In between, there’s an extended illness for the family matriarch, the grandmother, a grown woman who checks out of life to head to a Buddhist retreat, a medical emergency that may or may not be a suicide attempt, a teenaged girl falling in love for the first time, her father reconnecting with a lost love — and lots of delightful experiences for the eight year old boy named Yang-Yang.

Yang-Yang is clearly based on Edward Yang, but he stubbornly refused to acknowledge that connection, saying that all the characters in the film are a part of him. And that description stands up. Yang has great affection for this family, even the characters who seem ridiculous.

And there’s one more important piece to add about this family melodrama angle — the movie bears a surprising resemblance to “The Godfather.” The movies couldn’t be less alike, yet follow a pretty similar structure. But while “The Godfather” is about violence and power, “Yi Yi” is about the quiet, easily missed aspects of life.

Which brings me to the second thing to watch for in this film — how it chronicles everyday life in Taipei at the turn of the millennium. Edward Yang consciously made “Yi Yi” a reflection of life in Taipei at that time, and reflections play a huge visual part of the film. Yang perfected the use of glass, mirrors — even shiny wooden doors at times — as reflective surfaces that allowed him to show his characters at more than one perspective at once, and allowed him to bring in beautiful atmosphere and contrast into each frame.

Because he was so angry at the film distribution system in Taiwan, Edward Yang refused to let “Yi Yi” be screened in his home country, even after it became a significant global art house hit. Yang sadly died of cancer at the age of 61, about 7 years after the film was released. It was his final film — and it didn’t receive its Taipei premiere until 2017.

When it did finally come out, Taiwanese audiences embraced it as a perfect time capsule of its era. But that stands in strong contrast to how global fans of the film watch it. Outside of Taiwan, “Yi Yi” is praised for its universalism — for themes that resonate across generations and cultures.

But there’s one more aspect to that time capsule element that I find fascinating — Yang takes the film out of Taipei roughly 2/3 through the film for a trip to Tokyo. There, Yang films the city to look like the Taipei Yang knew in his youth. He grew up in a Taipei dominated by Japanese culture — Taiwan was a Japanese colony for roughly 40 years, and the Japanese not only built the Taiwanese health care and education systems, they left behind a railway system that resembled the Japanese system, especially in the use of above-ground trains.

Yang loved how those trains cut across the landscape and he found locations in Tokyo that echoed the Taiwan he once knew, creating a kind of time capsule within the time capsule.

By 2000 — and today — Taiwan no longer has the same look. The American influence led to a significant number of highways being built and a subway system did away with most of the above ground trains.

The nearly 20 year project to build that subway system was a running gag throughout Yang’s body of work — characters consistently attacked the cost overruns and blamed the French company responsible for delivering the system. It’s now regarded as one of the world’s great subway systems, but at the time, it was as controversial in Taipei as the parking meter system is in Chicago.

And this brings me to the final thing I’ll be keeping an eye on throughout this project — the Yang influences. I recently wrote about Charlotte Wells’ debut film “Aftersun.” She claims Edward Yang as a great influence on her work. They also have an interesting thing in common that I haven’t heard Wells mention — “Aftersun” and “Yi Yi” are the only two films I know that had movie posters with the main characters back to us.

Another interesting parallel is between Kryzsztof Kieslowski and Yang. While I’ve never seen Yang directly comment on Kieslowski, during the press tour for Three Colours, Kieslowski a couple of times noted that he was influenced by Edward Yang, especially his 1987 film “The Terrorizers.”

That Yang film includes subplots about surveillance and the role of fate — so it shouldn’t be surprising that Kieslowski latched onto it. Another parallel — this one sadder — both men died of cancer at the age of 61. In fact, so did Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasojiro Ozu. It’s a very strange coincidence.

And knowing what I know about Kieslowski and Yang, one neither of them would be willing to accept as just coincidence.