Zhang Yimou, the master of red lanterns who now rules China’s box office

Zhang Yimou

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 2, 1950 Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern
Awards	Golden Bear · 2 Golden Lion · Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival · BAFTA · Golden Horse · Peabody

Every few years someone writes the obituary of Zhang Yimou the artist, and Zhang Yimou the director releases another film that fills Chinese cinemas. The man who taught foreign audiences to see China through Gong Li’s face, a courtyard of red lanterns and a field of wild sorghum now makes spy thrillers, courtroom dramas and New Year blockbusters, faster than almost anyone of his generation. The two careers are usually told as a fall. Seen from the inside, they look more like one long negotiation with the system that trained him, funds him and, from time to time, still takes his films away.

That negotiation started before he ever held a camera. The family he was born into in Xi’an stood on the losing side of the civil war: his father, a dermatologist, had been an officer in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. During the Cultural Revolution he spent three years as a farm labourer and seven more in a cotton mill in Xianyang. He took up painting and still photography there, and sold his own blood to buy his first camera.

He turned 28 on 2 April 1978, the year the Beijing Film Academy reopened, which left him six years over the cinematography department’s age limit. His photographs made the case for him. They reached the minister of culture, Huang Zhen, who had the academy admit him as an auditing student; he graduated in 1982 alongside Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, the core of what became known as the Fifth Generation. At the Guangxi Film Studio he shot Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, the 1984 film now regarded as the movement’s founding work. In Wu Tianming’s Old Well he was both cameraman and leading man, and the performance won him the best actor award at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

His first film as director, Red Sorghum, won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1988. It was also Gong Li’s first leading role, and over the next seven years they made seven films together. Ju Dou became the first Chinese film nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and Raise the Red Lantern was nominated in turn and won a BAFTA. The Story of Qiu Ju took the Golden Lion in Venice in 1992. To Live, his adaptation of Yu Hua’s novel about a family crossing decades of upheaval, won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1994 and was banned at home. The professional and romantic partnership with Gong Li ended around Shanghai Triad in 1995.

He then changed register twice. For Not One Less, which brought him a second Golden Lion in 1999, he cast non-professional actors and shot on location in a village school; The Road Home, made straight afterwards, gave Zhang Ziyi her first screen role. Three years later came Hero, a wuxia epic with Jet Li and Tony Leung Chiu-wai that marked the Chinese industry’s move into large-scale commercial production. In North America it opened at number one in 2004 and became the third of his films nominated for the foreign-language Oscar. House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower followed in the same saturated colours. In 2008 he directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, a show that earned a Peabody Award, and in 2022 he did the same for the Winter Games.

This is where the usual account turns sour. Some critics argued that his films after the turn of the century carried the approval of the authorities his early work had troubled, and some Chinese critics had long accused him of selling an exotic, fragile China to foreign festivals. Zhang has said in interviews that he is not interested in politics. His filmography complicates both camps. The director of the Olympic ceremonies saw One Second, a love letter to celluloid set during the Cultural Revolution, withdrawn from the Berlin competition in 2019, officially because of technical difficulties in post-production. Under the Light, a police thriller about a powerful businessman, went through several rounds of edits, reshoots and redubbing before it reached cinemas in 2023, three years late. The novelist Yan Geling, who wrote the source material for The Flowers of War and Coming Home, took the producer and the foreign distributors of One Second to court after her name disappeared from its credits once she was blacklisted in China. His work is official enough to open the Olympics and vulnerable enough to be recut without explanation.

The commercial record has been just as uneven. The Great Wall, a 150-million-dollar co-production starring Matt Damon, was the most expensive film of his career and its biggest failure. He answered with Shadow, shot in the greys of Chinese ink painting, which won four Golden Horse Awards in 2018, including best director. A run of films aimed squarely at the domestic market followed: Cliff Walkers, Snipers and Full River Red, a Song dynasty mystery with Shen Teng and Jackson Yee that opened on Lunar New Year 2023 and became the highest-grossing film he has made. Article 20, a legal drama with Lei Jiayin built around the self-defence clause of China’s criminal law, arrived the following year.

Scare Out, released in China on 17 February 2026, wrote the relationship with the state into the credits. The spy thriller, starring Jackson Yee, Zhu Yilong and Song Jia, was made under the guidance of the Ministry of State Security, the first Chinese film to carry the agency’s public backing. It grossed around 200 million dollars. Reviews abroad were cool, and RogerEbert.com found little of the sensuousness that used to define his images.

His private life has rarely stayed private. Before leaving for the academy he married Xiao Hua, a school classmate from Xi’an; their daughter, Zhang Mo, was born in 1983, and they divorced in 1988. He married Chen Ting in 2011, and in 2014 the couple, who have three children, were fined 7,487,854 yuan by the family planning authorities in Wuxi for breaching the one-child policy.

This October he is in Busan as president of the competition jury at the 31st Busan International Film Festival, alongside Bi Gan and Kei Ishikawa. Asked about a festival title accused of distorting history, he answered with a line that could stand for his own career: “Creation is creation.” The next film is the one he has been circling since 2024, an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem developed with Enlight Media. The script is still being polished. “The Three-Body Problem is a great work of science fiction, but it’s hard to photograph,” he told the audience in Busan. No shooting date has been announced.