The Wedding Banquet (1993)

From Wong Kar-wai's Buenos Aires to Park Chan-wook's colonial Korea, queer desire in Asian cinema often arrives oblique, repressed, devastating, gorgeous. Farewell My Concubine's doomed love across decades of upheaval. Happy Together's toxic tango 18,000 km from home. The Handmaiden's electric, layered con game. Tropical Malady's mythic dissolution into the jungle. This flock is the canon — and a very good argument that Asian cinema does queer storytelling better than almost anyone.

The complete filmography of Ang Lee (李安, born 1954, Taiwan) — one of cinema's great genre-hoppers, and the only director to win the Academy Award for Best Director with films from three different countries. Lee studied at NYU before breaking through with his Taiwan Trilogy: Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman — intimate domestic comedies about tradition, identity and the Chinese family under pressure. From there he ranged freely across Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility), suburban American alienation (The Ice Storm), the American Civil War (Ride with the Devil), wuxia spectacle (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), gay romance on the American frontier (Brokeback Mountain), WWII erotic thriller (Lust, Caution), and digital visual spectacle (Life of Pi). His career is defined by formal restlessness and a recurring preoccupation with repression, desire, and the gap between inner life and social performance.