Lan Yu-Chinese Movie with English Subtitles

The movie is based on a novel published anonymously on the Internet in 1998. The filming itself took place in Beijing, without government permission. The movie, which was directed by internationally acclaimed director Stanley Kwan, tells a romantic and tragic love story of two men. It is based on the Chinese novel A Beijing Story by an author identified only as a Beijing Comrade, with "tongzhi" having blatantly homosexual overtones. Since this work contained positive depictions of gay men, explicit (by Chinese standards) gay sex scenes, and resurrected the ghost of Tiananmen Square, at the time, no mainland Chinese publisher would have dared to publish it. Nor would the author be safe from government reprisals.

Hence, its anonymous publication on the Internet. The story is set in Beijing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and makes vivid reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The film can be counted as a mainland-made movie as most of the crew are from mainland China. Lan Yu received a brief mainland Chinese run during the Film Association of Beijing University-sponsored ‘’China’s First Gay Film Festival‘’ at Beijing University in December 2001. Although publicity for this film festival was low-key and mainly limited to the University's website and students had to sell tickets out of dorm rooms, all scheduled screenings of this film quickly sold totally out. This move have won several awards.