A magnificent legend of desire, guilt, and war, which marked a breakthrough in Chinese cinema. Screening as part of the What’s with the Face? film programme.
Red Sorghum
- Date:
- 16 Aug 2026,
19:00–20:45
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Hóng gāoliáng
1988, Zhang Yimou
China
93 minutes, Mandarin with Russian subtitles
Starring: Gong Li, Jiang Wen, Teng Rujun, Ji Liu
T
Young Jiu’er’s freedom of action and desires defies the established order—and years later, it would transform into resistance against the Japanese occupiers. Zhang Yimou’s 1988 debut movie won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale and became the first film from the People’s Republic of China to be released in American cinemas.
Shot from Red Sorghum, 1988
There is a strength in the simplicity of this story, in the almost fairy-tale quality of its images and the shocking suddenness of its violence, that Hollywood in its sophistication has lost.
—Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
The world viewed Red Sorghum as an exotic spectacle, astonishing in its flights of fancy and shifts in tone, without fully grasping Zhang’s directorial choices. Behind them, however, lay a thoughtful and sophisticated dialogue with millennia of Chinese culture — a scathing, unabashed protest against the Confucian ethics of obedience and restraint.
