New Year Sacrifice

Xianglin Sao lives all alone after her husband passed away. To pay for the cost of his coffin, her mother-in-law wants to sell her to He Laoliu. Xianglin Sao flees and finds work as a maidservant, but she is quickly captured and forced to marry He Laoliu. Two years later, Xianglin Sao also loses her “second family”, sealing her fate as a bringer of misfortune.

Ben Singer: “Melodrama’s deep-rooted moral impulse, its capacity to vivify popular conceptions of good and evil on both social and personal levels, made it a natural asset in the post-war global boom in progressive nation-building and ideological reform. This PRC film—like so many others in China, but also in India, Mexico, and elsewhere—condemns the iniquities of the former social order: feudalism, capitalist exploitation, religious mystification, patriarchal oppression, irrational superstition, social ostracization, and the like. The cruelty of the natural world compounds the misery.”

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