Raise the Red Lantern

Raise the Red Lantern is a 1991 Chinese film directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li, adapted from Su Tong's novella Wives and Concubines, about Songlian, a young woman forced by her family's financial ruin to become the fourth wife of a wealthy man in 1920s China, and her entry into the rigid, ritualized rivalry among his household's concubines, where the nightly lighting of red lanterns signals whose chamber the master will visit that night. The film's stylized, symmetrical visual design and its use of the lantern ritual to dramatize confinement and status anxiety made it one of the most internationally recognized works of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers. It won the Silver Lion at the 1991 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.