Farewell My Concubine follows two Peking opera performers across five decades of Chinese history. Their artistic partnership and fraught personal bond are tested by war, revolution, and ideological purges. Directed by Chen Kaige and starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li, it uses the formal rigour of opera as both subject and structure — tracing how discipline, repetition, and gesture sustain and ultimately shatter the self.
A 1991 Mandarin-language period drama directed by Zhang Yimou and adapted by Ni Zhen from Su Tong’s novella, Raise the Red Lantern follows Songlian (Gong Li), a young woman forced into becoming the fourth wife of a wealthy patriarch in 1920s Republican China. Set within the rigid confines of the Qiao Family Compound, the film charts her gradual subjection to a system where status is signalled by red lanterns, nightly visits, and foot massages — all governed by unspoken rules and silent hierarchies. Zhao Fei’s cinematography, Zhao Jiping’s score and Gong Li’s restrained performance cohere into a portrait of enclosure, repetition and eroded agency.
Set in rural Shaanxi in 1992, Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju follows a pregnant peasant woman’s dogged pursuit of a simple apology from the village headman who injured her husband. Shot with documentary restraint and anchored by Gong Li’s understated performance, the film charts her passage through layers of China’s evolving legal bureaucracy — not as satire or protest, but as a precise, unsentimental study of how institutions absorb, deflect, and ultimately misinterpret human need.