Little Toys

Sister Ye ends in the street, crying to a crowd of extras and to the theatre that the enemy is coming. She is a village toymaker whose husband dies and whose son is stolen and sold to a rich family; warlord fighting burns the village and the survivors carry their trade to Shanghai; then the Japanese bomb the Chinese quarter in 1932 and take her daughter, and the son, now a rich boy, buys a toy from his mother without knowing her. Ruan Lingyu is Ye and Li Lili the daughter. Sun Yu made it a year after the bombing, for an audience that had been under it. Lianhua, Shanghai, 1933.