Farewell My Concubine
Leaving Soon
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2h 51m
Leaving June 1
Directed by Kaige Chen | 171 mins | 1993
Art and life become inextricably entwined in Chen’s gorgeously arrayed triumph of costume and production design: an epic spanning 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history in the life of a troupe of Peking opera actors based on the 1985 Lilian Lee novel, and a landmark of Fifth Generation Mainland cinema, notable for being the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Cheung stars as the orphaned Dieyi, trained to play dan (female roles), his unrequited adoration of frequent male co-star Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) remaining a constant through the disruptions of war and political turmoil, up until the film’s startling, cathartic climax.
Up Next in Leaving Soon
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Friday Night Saturday Morning
Leaving June 1
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 16 mins | 2005
Carried across the seas by signals between chunky cell phones, yearning suffuses this sweet and slender, vérité-style story of lovers divided by geography—he in Recife, she in Kyiv. -
Green Vinyl
Leaving June 1
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 17 mins | 2014
A mother’s gift of a box of old records to her young daughter comes with one proviso: never listen to the green one! Adapted from a Russian folktale, this lo-fi stop-motion short—a Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection—offers an o...
