Rouge of the North

107 minutes | 1988 | Fiction | Mandarin | English and Chinese Subtitles
2K Restoration

Content Advisory: This film contains scenes of tobacco and substance use.

In late Qing Dynasty Shanghai, Yin-te (HSIA Wen-Shi), coming from a family of modest means, is married into the wealthy gentry Yao family, only to discover on the wedding day that her husband (Jack KAO) is blind and bedridden. She bears great suffering, and her desires are being stirred but remain unfulfilled when her husband’s frivolous younger brother (HSU Ming) seduces her. Yin-te raises her son and eventually becomes the matriarch of the household, enduring a life of solitude and turbulence.

Film director and critic Fred TAN was born in 1949. He started writing film critiques while studying law at National Taiwan University. He also worked as the editor of the magazine Influence. In 1975, he went to UCLA to study filmmaking, where he made a documentary short on actress CHENG Pei-pei as his thesis film. He paid attention to the unconventionally sexual narratives in American and European films. His debut feature, Dark Night (1986), was the first Taiwanese film released in art theatres on the West Coast in the US. He made two more features, Split of the Spirit (1987) and Rouge of the North (1988), before passing away in 1990 at the age of 41.