The daily life of ordinary people of Shanghai apartment building: an unemployed person who tries not to lose face by concealing the loss of his job, a singer without an audience, a driver, a teacher, but also the owner of the building and his prodigal son.
This early classic of Golden Age Shanghai cinema echoes Visconti's classic La Terra Trema in its beautifully rendered story of a humble silk-farming family struggling to be free of debt to exploitative middlemen.