Delayed Rays of a Star

Photographed together at a party in Weimar Berlin, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl are ambitious women on the cusp of stardom. Cross-dressing bisexual Dietrich, shunned by Germany for her anti-Nazi views finds it in Hollywood, the city which adores her till her wrinkles begin to show. Riefenstahl finds it a few years later in Germany where she becomes her admired fuhrer's favourite filmmaker, spending the rest of her long years trying to make people forget. Anna May Wong discovers that regardless of a generation's sacrifice in defeating the swastika, as a Chinese-American actress, her character will die nine and a half times out of ten films because a white male lead has to end up with a white female lead. But the real question is, how much has anything changed?

An exquisite debut about womanhood, the movie industry, and every shade of fascism, Delayed Rays of a Star introduces a mesmerising new talent for our times.