You should watch some of the 1930s Chinese films (many of which are silent) like Tianming (Daybreak) and Xiao Wan Yi (Little Toys/Playthings) from Sun Yu. They are “dreamy” in aesthetics at times while depicting harsh social realities of military invasion, women’s subjugation and capitalism. They are actually some of the most accessible silent films made anywhere in the world, much more narrative focused than French ones, similar to Murnau’s Sunrise or Chaplin’s best work (granted the ones I named are less comic, but plenty of comedies exist) in being poetic yet story driven. Probably you do watch silent films if you’re on this sub, I’m just including the caveat in case you don’t—these films, in addition to Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess, are a great place for anyone to start with silent cinema, especially as some of the available versions have extremely good, but not distracting, scores. Also, the world of China they depict—a capitalist society with large and modern developed cities of gleaming technology plugged into the latest in global culture, even while the people are stratified into highly unequal social classes and many struggle in abject poverty, with mass migrations of rural peasants to cities, and women are especially victimized by these social inequalities—describes the world (not specifically China, although that too) of today much closer than most Chinese films of the ‘50s-80s, which tend to depict either ancient societies, “untouched” traditional rural areas, or in the case of Maoist era filmmaking, a very specific modern culture that for better or worse, no longer exists anywhere on earth, and is not easily relatable to those who didn’t live in it. The 1930s Chinese cinema has more in common with Wong Kar-wai or post-Sixth Generation Chinese films in its interest in urban life (without entirely neglecting rural), and its non-doctrinaire, complex leftist stance, an avoidance of idealizing the traditional or the simple, as we see in Maoist era. The filmmakers were primarily on the left, but many were persecuted after Mao gained power, in part because he had married a minor actress from the Shanghai film scene, Jiang Qing, and she turned her personal feuds into political denunciations. Jiang Qing appeared in two films that are actually very good, 1935’s Scenes of City Life (an early sound film, a dark comedy, where she has only a very small role) and 1936’s Blood on Wolf Mountain (her role is a bit larger here—it’s a powerful and poetic vision of the Japanese invasions of China in the period, in the metaphor of what can be called a horror film, about a village under siege from wolf attacks).