Chiu Shu-San

Hong Kong fantasy film directed by Chiu Shu-San.

The story follows a Chinese-American girl who falls for a Cantonese opera star against her father's wishes and becomes pregnant.

This is the first 16mm Cantonese film in full colour, shot on 1940s state-of-the-art Technicolor film stock. Opera star Man-ha (Leung Bik-yuk) enjoys tremendous popularity during her performances in San Francisco, but drowns herself in the vices and temptations of the big city. Increasingly, she fails to show up for performances, almost causing the theatre to go bankrupt. When she sees her lover for the scoundrel that he is, she also sees the errors of her own ways and saves the theatre, restoring it to glory. Joseph Sunn Jue established the Grandview Film Company in Hong Kong during the 1930s and continued making films in the USA during wartime by collaborating with Chinese opera performers in exile there. Wong Hok-sing, an opera actor himself, directed, wrote and starred in this film. He staged a spectacular play-within-a-play at the end, not only to promote the art of Cantonese opera but also to boost solidarity among overseas Chinese through difficult times.

This love story spans more than a decade in the lives of an émigré engineer and a widowed primary-school teacher, a tragedy set in a small town by a lake, filmed in beautiful California locations.

A rural employee leaves his wife and mother to seek work in the city.

A wartime drama set in Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when people fled to Hong Kong from Mainland China.

A remake (or ripoff) of Chaplin's City Lights