[2][5][8] The plot centers on Kkot-bun, a girl living under Japanese occupation who sells flowers on the street to help care for her sick mother and her little sister who was blinded by a landlord's wife.
The landlord's wife becomes very sick, and suspects that the flower girl's blind sister is possessed by the spirit of her deceased mother, and so arranges for her to be frozen to death in the snow.
At this moment, her brother, who has joined the Revolutionary Army, returns home to visit family when he realises that the flower girl has been locked up, and so organises a group of villagers to overthrow the landlord.
For many years after liberation, the opera hadn't been performed since, until it was improved and adapted for film, and re-written as a novel, under the guidance of the Organising Secretary (Kim Jong-il) and released in the early 1970s.
[10] According to official North Korean reports, in April 1968, Kim Jong Il suggested that another revolutionary opera, Sea of Blood, be adapted into a movie.
[3]: 200–201 According to Paul Fischer, the author of A Kim Jong-Il Production, "it is almost impossible to exaggerate" the importance of The Flower Girl to North Korea's cultural history.
[13] In 1998, the Supreme Court of Korea ruled that The Flower Girl and six other North Korean films were "not favouring anti-ROK sentiments" in regards to national security laws.
[14][15] The opera and its film adaptation were both well received in the People's Republic of China when they were introduced there since September 9, 1972, the day both premiered, predominantly during the closing period of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of the era of Deng Xiaoping's rule, where the production was known by the name of The Flower-selling Girl (Chinese: 卖花姑娘; pinyin: Màihuā Gūniang).
As the film was played in Chinese cinemas during the period of the Cultural Revolution, the movie became immensely popular not just due to its proletarian revolution-based content but also since it was set in the 1930s - the same era as the beginning of the Japanese-held state of Manchukuo and during the years of the suffering of many Koreans in China under Japanese rule in the peninsula, to the point where theaters even adopted a 24-hour screening cycle because of high ticket sales.