Copy Reference Chinese cinema-goers this year will get a bigger helping not only of home produced films but a good selection of foreign films, in black and white, colour and wide-screen. More than a hundred and fifty films will be released this year; about forty of these are new Chinese films.
The problems of youth are central in at least four new Chinese films: A Nurse's Diary, Happiness, A Girl from Shanghai and Looking for a Husband. Who Is the Forsaken One is a morality of today. A young peasant who gets a job in the city loses his bearings and becomes a shady philanderer. When he finds that the young girl he has deceived is expecting a baby, he rushes back to his village to get a divorce. His wife agrees to the separation, but by the time he gets back to the city his erstwhile girl friend has seen through him and the question in the film's title is answered.
Song of the Phoenix and The Joyful Sound of the Flute are also about the new Chinese countryside and co-op movement. The former centres around a peasant girl who fights for the co-op movement against the feudal-minded die-hards of her village. The latter film is the story of how a group of poor peasants take the co-op path.
Secret Watch in Canton gives a glimpse of the tireless struggle that the Chinese security forces have to wage against counter-revolutionary organizations working for Chiang Kai-shek and his American backers. In Flames on the Border, this subject is excitingly combined with the life of the peoples in one of China's south-western national minority areas.
Also to be released this year are film versions of famous operas, such as The Stagecraft of Mei Lan-fang (Part II), the famous Kunchu opera Fifteen Strings of Cash, the Peking operas Battle of Wits and Borrowing the East Wind, the Fukien opera Chen San and Wu-niang, and the Szechuan opera Tu Shih-niang.
A large number of foreign films will be shown this year, some of which will be dubbed in Chinese. Famous Soviet films to be dubbed include And Quiet Flows the Don, based on Sholokhov's great novel, The Sisters, based on A. Tolstoi's novel Ordeal, and film versions of B. Lavrenyov's The Forty-first, K. Fedin's Early Joys and Goldoni's A Servant of Two Masters. The Soviet production of Shakespeare's Othello, also dubbed, will soon be released.
Other foreign films to be distributed this year include Red Glow over Kladno, based on the late Czechoslovak President Antonin Zapotocky's novel, and Life Was the Stake (Czechoslovakia); They Love Life and The Wrecks (Poland); Two Times Two Sometimes Make Five and Discord (Hungary); The Captain of Cologne (German Democratic Republic); The Crumbling Citadel (Bulgaria); Red Lotus (Rumania); Great and Small (Yugoslavia), and others.
French and British films will also be shown this year in China. They include Bel Ami, Hamlet, Oliver Twist and The Thief of Bagdad. The Indian film Pather Panchali which won international acclaim, the Mexican film Roots and the Spanish film The Death of a Cyclist are also due for release this year.
In addition, Greek, Norwegian, Australian and Austrian films will be shown for the first time in China. They include The Counterfeit Sovereign (Greece), The North Sea Convoy (Norway), Three in One (Australia), and Omaru (Austria).