Fabiano Canosa declared PRINCESS YANG KWEI FEI “the most beautiful film ever made” and selected it as his favourite Japanese film of all time, as did Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira. Louis Marcorelles pronounced PRINCESS “perhaps the most beautiful hymn ever raised by the cinema to the love of a woman for a man;” Andrew Sarris called it “one of the most beautiful films ever to treat beauty as a subject.” Mizoguchi’s first colour film, set in eighth-century China, concerns a T’ang Emperor who is unable to forget his beloved dead wife. He marries a poor, beautiful servant from the countryside, and makes her his princess, which leads to political catastrophe. Among the most haunting sequences in all Mizoguchi is PRINCESS’s famous finale, in which the lovers transcend death and join in an embrace of ghostly laughter – “what must be one of the most chillingly beautiful moments in all cinema” (The New York Times).