The Wedding Banquet

The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival, sharing the top prize with The Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls by Chinese director Xie Fei. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, further establishing Ang Lee's international reputation.

The Wedding Banquet is commonly grouped with Pushing Hands (1991) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) as Ang Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy, exploring generational and cultural tensions within Chinese and Taiwanese families. All three films were co-written or written with James Schamus and explore how traditional family expectations collide with modern identities.

The film follows Wai-Tung, a gay Taiwanese-American man living in New York with his partner Simon, who agrees to a marriage of convenience with a Chinese woman needing a green card. The plan unravels when his traditional parents arrive from Taiwan to organize an elaborate wedding banquet, forcing Wai-Tung to conceal his relationship with Simon.

The Wedding Banquet was notable for depicting a same-sex relationship within an Asian family context at a time when such stories rarely reached mainstream audiences. Released the same year as Philadelphia, it contributed to a pivotal year for LGBTQ+ visibility in widely distributed cinema and became one of the most commercially successful independent films of 1993.