Raise the Red Lantern

Zhang Yimou's Academy Award-nominated *Raise the Red Lantern* (1991) follows nineteen-year-old Songlian, who abandons her studies to become the fourth concubine of a wealthy patriarch, entering a household where red lanterns are lit each night outside the chosen wife's chambers — a ritual that determines privilege, status, and survival. Gong Li delivers a nuanced, understated performance as a young woman ground down by isolation and repression before she begins to play the household's politics against itself. This newly completed 4K restoration, carried out by the Udine Far East Film Festival under the supervision of Director Zhang Yimou, used the original image and sound negatives alongside a vintage print preserved at the Venice Biennale's Historical Archive. Rated PG; screening as part of Inverness Film Festival.