Red Sorghum is an classics and excellence made in China movie and it is adapted from Mo Yan’s novel of the same name. It is well known that Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for literature for this novel.
Directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Jiang Wen, Gong Li and Teng Rujun, the Red Sorghum was released in China in 1987. The film is set in Gaomi, Shandong during the Anti-Japanese War. It tells the story of the hero and heroine through twists and turns to run a wine shop together, but in the Japanese aggression war, both the heroine and the workshop staff because of participation in the resistance movement and the Japanese army maltreated the story.
After the film was released, it had unprecedented influence. Instead of copying the stream of consciousness structure of the novel, the film changes the story into a straight line narration. The director and photography carefully reproduce the color world of the novel structure, which makes the picture very impressive. In 1988, red sorghum won the golden bear prize at the 38th Berlin international film festival. It was the first Asian film to win the prize. 
Red Sorghum is not only a personal work of Zhang Yimou, it is also a symbol of vitality throughout the 1980s. It depicts the primitive life of a group of peasants in the 1930s and 1940s in China, and evokes the pursuit of freedom in that crazy and disorderly era. It not only expresses the pursuit of free personality in defiance of traditional etiquette, but also shows the folk customs with different expressions.
The film awakens our sleeping national memory and makes us see the road our nation has walked through. Nowadays, people should watch this film when they are deeply aware of the heaviness and oppression of modern social life. Maybe it can inject an ancient, national and primitive vitality into you.
