One of the last films made in Shanghai before Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Two Stage Sisters follows the lives of two female opera performers, one of whom succumbs to bourgeois decadence as the mistress of a Shanghai theater manager, while the other is radicalized in the May Fourth Movement. The director, Xie Jin, was at the time one of the most celebrated of China’s Third Generation filmmakers, with six of his films voted Best Picture at China’s Hundred Flowers Awards (equivalent to the Oscars). Yet, despite the director’s standing, Two Stage Sisters came under fire for its sympathetic portrayal of the “bad” sister. (Madame Mao herself described the film as a “poisonous weed.”) The film would be suppressed for some fifteen years before its rediscovery in 1979, whereupon it became a major influence on Fifth Generation works like Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1992).

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