Five Golden Flowers

Five Golden Flowers (1959)

五朵金花

Ah Peng meets a girl named Jinhua at a festival and they agree to meet the next year but she fails to turn up. He searches for her and finds other girls named Jinhua.

Date of release
1959-10-01
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (8)
Runtime
1h 45m
Genres
Music, Romance
Director
Wang Jiayi

Casting

Interesting facts

Five Golden Flowers is a 1959 Chinese romantic musical film directed by Wang Jiayi and produced by Changchun Film Studio. The screenplay was written by Zhao Jikang and Wang Gongpu. Set in the Dali City in Yunnan Province, the film is about a Bai ethnic youth, Ah Peng, searching for his beloved ethnic girl Jin Hua. Made during the Great Leap Forward, the film celebrates socialist construction and agricultural collectivization. The theme song of the film "By the Butterfly Spring," composed by musician Lei Zhenbang, was one of the most well-known folk songs in China. The film was produced and released in 1959.

Production

In 1958, Changchun Film Studio's workshops and canteens all turned into studios. Big-character posters that discussed film scripts were hung on every wall. In the same year, Changchun Film Studio launched 31 "satellite" films. No one dared to say anything about the poor artistic quality of those films, because saying that demonstrated an "incorrect attitude" (taidu wenti) and "incorrect standpoint" (lichang wenti).

The Central Secretariat in 1958 pointed out that the film production in 1959 shouldered the task of producing "gift presentation films" (xianli pian) for the tenth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Xia Yan, who was appointed in 1954 as Vice Minister of Culture, made a report on "gift presentation films" in 1958.

After viewing several gift presentation films, Zhou Enlai was disappointed that they lacked "a sense of beauty, joviality and vivacity". He suggested Xia Yan find a joyful and lighthearted subject matter. To break from the serious topics dealing with revolutionary and war, Xia Yan instructed the Propaganda Department of the Yunnan Provincial Committee to produce a comedy film that features singing and dancing and the picturesque landscape in Yunn…

The screenplay, written by Zhao Jikang and Wang Gongpu, was originally titled Duoduo Jinhua and featured twelve golden flowers. After reading, Xia Yan reduced the number of golden flowers to five. Xia Yan in his comments on the script encouraged the scenarist to liberate their thoughts and try to keep the story entertaining. Five Golden Flowers was made with an "international imagination".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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