The Last Emperor 末代皇帝

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor traces the life of Aisin-Gioro Puyi, China’s eleventh and final Qing dynasty monarch. Told through flashbacks, it interweaves Puyi’s re-education in a Communist prison camp with the opulent yet confined world of the Forbidden City. Spanning more than half a century, the film charts China’s dramatic transformations - from imperial grandeur to revolutionary upheaval. Its monumental scale and intimate psychological detail make The Last Emperor both a historical epic and a meditation on identity, privilege, and loss - a universal portrait of humanity caught between memory and modernity.