Farewell My Concubine

Farewell My Concubine is a 1993 Chinese film directed by Chen Kaige, adapted from Lilian Lee's novel, tracing the decades-long relationship between two Peking opera performers, Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou, who together perform the opera Farewell My Concubine from their childhood training in the 1920s through Japanese occupation, civil war and the Cultural Revolution. The film uses the two men's shifting bond, complicated by Dieyi's unrequited love for Xiaolou and Xiaolou's marriage to a former courtesan, to dramatize how political upheaval reshapes personal and artistic life across twentieth-century China. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, shared with Jane Campion's The Piano, becoming the first and to date only Chinese-language film to do so.