The Lin Family Shop
Financial and political pressures bankrupt a Chinese store owner.
Also Directed by Choui Khoua
The most outstanding representative film soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China is The White-Haired Girl, co-directed by Wang Bin and Shui Hua. It is based on the legend of a white-haired female immortal. It tells of Yang Bailao, a tenant farmer who shares his life with his daughter Xi'er. The despotic landlord, Huang Shiren, attempts to forcibly take Xi'er for himself. On the eve of the Chinese Spring Festival, Huang forces Yang to sell his daughter as repayment of the debt Yang owes him.
A taut wartime thriller, Red Crag: Life in Eternal Flame anticipates the paranoia and violence of the imminent Cultural Revolution while harking back to the aesthetic splendour of the Golden Age Shanghai cinema of the late 1940s. (This opulence is largely due to the work of cinematographer Zhu Jinming, the master visual stylist of Shangrao Concentration Camp and other key "Seventeen Years" films.) The film concerns a hard-boiled woman working in the Chongqing Communist underground during World War II, whose commitment to the guerrilla cause is only intensified after she witnesses her husband's head mounted on the city walls by the Nationalist forces.
Directed by Choui Khoua.
Yi Ru is falsely accused of being a rightist in the People's Republic of China and severs all connections with his family.
