Helen Foster Snow, collaborator and wife of historian Edgar Snow, left Utah as an inexperienced 18-year old and threw herself into the turmoil of Revolutionary China. This engrossing documentary of her life allows us to view rare archival footage and photos of what she witnessed from 1931 until 1940, as China experienced devastating floods, famine, revolution, civil war and bombardment and invasion by the Japanese.
For historians in both China and the U.S., her first-hand account of the Chinese Revolution in the mid-1930’s in her articles and book, Inside Red China, made a crucial contribution to the record of the birth of modern China. Her interviews of Mao and the men who worked alongside him for four decades after the Long March are considered highly significant by the historians and politicians interviewed in this film. She also contributed to her husband, Edgar Snow’s more famous book, Red Star Over China (1936), work which was uncredited though substantial. Their troubled, competitive marriage ended in divorce in 1949.
Today she is a hero to the Chinese for her participation in the student movement, her writing and her role in the creation of the wartime (WWII) industrial cooperatives called INDUSCO. Her death was marked by a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, covered by China’s biggest TV stations and newspapers.

"The quality of the film is good, it is well edited, interviews are brief, voice-overs are appropriate, and the photographs of China in the 1930s from Snow's collection and the National Archives are quite wonderful... Snow's archives and the images of China it presents should be valuable to students and those interested in Chinese history, 20th Century history, women's history and Chinese-US relations. Recommended" MC Journal; The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship

CINE Gold Eagle, 2001