This poster was used to advertise the Mandarin movie, ‘The True Story of Ah Q’ (阿Q正传, A‘Q’zhengzhuan). The movie’s plot was based on a short novel of the same title that was written by Zhou Shuren (周树人), one of the great literary figures of 20th century China. Zhou was better known to his readers by his pen name ‘Lu Xun’ (鲁迅).Between the 1950s and 1960s, most Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese-dialect movies were made in Hong Kong by film production companies with financial support from Singapore-based film studios such as Shaw Brothers, Cathay and Kong Ngee (光艺, Guanyi). These studios were also involved in the distribution and exhibition of these movies in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia through their network of cinemas. In the early 1970s, Mandarin movies from Taiwan became popular, but by the late 1970s, Hong Kong movies were dominant once more.
