Two Stage Sisters

From 1935 to 1950, the story of two women who perform opera. Chunhua and Yuehong leave a small country folk troupe and join a theatre company in Shanghai. They perform Shaoxing opera, and the bond between them comes apart along ideological lines as the country goes through its upheavals. Xie Jin’s film was one of the last made before the Cultural Revolution. It was banned after its release for bourgeois humanism, the charge being that it had been too sympathetic to the sister who gives in to materialism. When the Cultural Revolution began, Xie Jin was imprisoned. Xie Fang and Cao Yindi play the leads.