About

Once described by celebrated critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as "a masterpiece... the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen," Centre Stage is a reflexive biopic of the first Chinese leading lady of silent cinema, Ruan Lingyu.

Directed by Stanley Kwan, Centre Stage traces Ruan’s rise to fame, her struggles with the tabloid press, and death by suicide age 24. Maggie Cheung plays Ruan, both in a dramatisation of her life and in recreations of lost films starring the late actress. These threads are masterfully woven together with actual footage of Ruan from her final two films, The Goddess 1934 and New Women 1935, alongside interviews with Ruan’s contemporaries, and conversations between Kwan, Cheung, and her co-star Carina Lau.

Creating a delicate push and pull between inhabiting and reflecting upon the figure of Ruan, as well as her own experience of stardom sixty years later, Maggie Cheung’s portrait of the "Chinese Garbo" is an emotional tour de force. Through her prodigious performance — which won Cheung the Best Actress award at the 1992 Berlin Film Festival — the tragic story of Ruan transforms into a powerful conversation about women’s experience in the film industry across the decades.

PG | Adult themes