New Women

Wei Ming is a music teacher who becomes known overnight for the novel she has written. But when her daughter falls ill she cannot find the money for treatment; her publisher stalls her, a rich and insistent man will not leave her alone, and she looks for a way out in an arrangement for a single night. The next day the newspapers expose her by name. The film starts from the story of Ai Xia, the actress and writer who ended her life in 1934 after being made a target of the press, and it takes on the Shanghai tabloids openly. Ruan Lingyu, in the lead, died shortly after the film opened, following the same papers’ treatment of her. Cai Chusheng’s hundred and six minute Chinese film was completed in 1935.