Red Sorghum was an international sensation which won the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival and propelled Zhang Yimou to arthouse stardom. Adapting Nobel Laureate Mo Yan’s bawdy and brutal novel, Zhang depicts the fortunes of a rural wine distillery during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Gong Li stars (in her debut role) as a young woman sold into a marriage to the leprous owner of the distillery. When her husband is killed in mysterious circumstances, she inherits his business and endeavours to survive and succeed in a patriarchal and semi-lawless society, and against the ever-encroaching war. Zhang captures the potent energy of the source material, with use of deeply saturated colours (primarily, red), and the vast swaying fields of Sorghum which conceal and reveal both intense danger and liberating escape. Barbarism and romanticism coexist in this intoxicating slice of folk-filmmaking, arguably the wildest and most peculiarly optimistic entry in Zhang’s filmography.

Our screening on Friday 19 July was introduced by Victor Fan (KCL).

Cast:
Gong Li, Jiang Wen, Teng Ru-jun, Ji Liu