Chen Juan-Juan

Live action adaptation of Snow White fairy tale.

A silent Chinese feature film

Overnight, the sexy Wei Ming will become a successful novelist. But, desperate to get the money that she needs to cure her little daughter (and harassed by a rich, unscrupulous rake), she will end up eventually engage in luxury prostitution.

A scholar falls for a beautiful maiden whom he invites to stay with him, but she is not what she seems to be...

Two couple doubt their partners are having affairs with another, so they try their best to find out the truth.

Ma the flying bandit calls it quits after his daughter is born. His wife, a onetime prostitute, can’t stand poverty and turns him in to the authorities before resuming her profession. Years later, when the daughter is set to get married, the unabashed mother blackmails her own flesh and blood, so Ma has to escape from prison to thwart her.

Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the big four of classic Chinese novels, has been adapted for film and television dozens of times over the past decades. Yet this sui generis Great Wall production daringly transposes the setting to modern-day 1950s. The contemporised story revolves nonetheless around the love triangle between Jia Baoyu and his two cousins. Both girls love him but his heart belongs to only one. The ending, however, is remarkably changed to separation of the lovers as a result of war—the war that was surely still haunting the minds of the filmmakers at the time when the film was made. Not only did Great Wall pour money into building extravagant sets just so to recreate down to the smallest detail the grandeur of the legendary Jia mansion, but the film also boasted of its lavish costume designs for the diverse female cast. (From Hong Kong Film Archive)