Mingxing Film Company

In old Shanghai, two sisters, a prostitute and a singer, try to escape from the local scoundrels with the help of a trumpet player and a newspaper seller.

This early classic of Golden Age Shanghai cinema echoes Visconti's classic La Terra Trema in its beautifully rendered story of a humble silk-farming family struggling to be free of debt to exploitative middlemen.

Four students in Shanghai have recently finished university. All are unemployed. Xu contemplates suicide but his friend Zhao talks him out of it. Zhao lives in a shabby room with just a flimsy wall of planks separating him from the room behind. Miss Yang, in town to take a factory job, moves in behind. Her nails into the wall knock Zhao's photos down. The unseen neighbours start playing tit for tat... Zhao gets a job as proofreader at a newspaper. He sees that pretty girl on the tram to work every day. He doesn't know her, but it's Miss Yang... Zhao is assigned to cover labour conditions for the paper. He is sent to a factory, the one where Miss Yang works...

A primary school teacher rallies the citizens of a small town to resist the corruption of the local government and unite to build reinforcements against an oncoming flood.

Cheng the fruit seller is in love with the daughter of his neighbor the doctor, but the good doctor won't let him marry her unless Chang finds him more patients...

A hostess in Shanghai invites her secondary schoolmates to a reunion. They each reminisce about their lives, with some having difficulties in marriage or career. Some led destructive lives, while others contributed to the country.

Part two of A comedy film set on Shanghai film studio. The background events frequently involve the shooting of other films being made at Mingxing Film Company at the time. This includes a sequence of the 17th episode of the silent wuxia film series Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, which is the only known footage from this historic series to exist.

The first Chinese sound film. It tells the story of Hong Pion (Red Peony), a singer-songwriter who, after her marriage to the depraved Faxiang Chen, not only tormented and suffered, but also endured the decline of her artistic career.

The New Year's Gift is the story of some lucky money gifted to a girl. It then leaves her and passes from hand to hand.

After being defeated in a fight by a local gang, local official Lu Fengyang sends his weak and sickly son Lu Xiaoqing to study with a master of the Kunlun school of martial arts. Recovered and strong, he comes upon the Red Lotus Temple, and puts up there for the night. Unable to sleep, he begins looking around the palatial temple, and discovers a room decorated with many images of Buddhist demons, and an altar to worship them... Purposely destroyed serial film whose 19 full length chapters (averaging 86 minutes each) originally ran 27 hours in length.

Made in Shangai.