Forbidden City (film)
2025 Italian film

The Forbidden City (Italian: La città proibita) is a 2025 Italian martial arts film directed by Gabriele Mainetti, and starring Enrico Borello, Yaxi Liu, Marco Giallini, Sabrina Ferilli, Chunyu Shanshan, and Luca Zingaretti.
The film was released on 13 March 2025. It has been nominated in seven categories at the 71st David di Donatello Awards, including for Best Director.
Plot
1995. Yun and Mei are two sisters born in China during the one-child policy period, which lasted from 1979 to 2015. To protect Mei, their parents decide to keep her presence a secret and raise the girls with martial arts training.
In the present day, Mei arrives in Rome to find her sister Yun. In the Esquilino Chinatown neighborhood, she finds the restaurant "La città proibita", run by the Chinese boss Wang, which is a place of prostitution and illegal dealings. Mei confronts Wang's men in an attempt to find her sister, possibly held prisoner for sexual exploitation. She discovers that Yun is no longer there and that she might be connected to Alfredo, the owner of a nearby trattoria.
The public source identifies “Forbidden City (film)” as 2025 Italian film. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Forbidden, City and film.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q132797604. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 1995, 1979 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Forbidden City (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.