The story of Xinghua

Classically-filmed love drama set in a mountain village in northern China. It is about falling moral values now the economy is being liberalised and enterprise is no longer a dirty word. This message is packaged in a fine allegorical melodrama with a feminist tinge. The demolition of a section of the Great Wall of China and a temple symbolise the evil side of social change.Grocer Wanglai cheats his customers and has a licence to sell the stones from the Great Wall. He leads the destruction of the temple to dig up a legendary treasure hidden in it. He mistreats his wife Xinghua because she doesn't give him a son; She doesn't get pregnant and increasingly rejects his sexual advances.îThe woman falls in love with a young man who demonstrates his feeling for ethics by lovingly planting an orchard in the desert. But when the secret love leads to pregnancy, the constructive young man turns out to share Wanglai's views on the role of women. In the end Xinghua takes her fate into her own hands.