Raise The Red Lantern

Zhang, director of 'Ju Dou' and 'Red Sorghum', again combines exquisitely beautiful photography with formalised melodrama, but this time creates one of the most moving films to appear anywhere on the world circuit in recent years.

Essentially the tale of a young girl forced to become a concubine and the jealousies she encounters in her fortress home, it also acts as a metaphor for the repression of individual passions in post-Tiananmen China.