In 1937 Ufa asked Douglas Sirk (then Detlef Sierck) to turn their new Swedish discovery Zarah Leander into a German film star. He did it with Zu neuen Ufern, truly an extraordinary and fascinating melodrama that begins as a Victorian English period piece and develops into a kind of women's Western in the no-man's-land of Australia. Leander plays a popular chanteuse-darling of the London upper crust but no lady-who takes the rap on a forgery charge to protect her weak-willed aristocratic lover (played by Willy Birgel). She is banished to Parramatta, a women's prison in Sydney. In that closed society of women she learns of a scheme whereby, due to the dearth of British females in the frontier colony, inmates may secure their release by contracting to marry local settlers. It is a typically Sirkian trade-off. Juxtaposition of the prisons of the Old World with those of the New is further emphasized by cinematographer Franz Weihmayr. Indeed, Sirk viewed the film as "a piece of social criticism" and constructed it in a Brechtian fashion; critic Jon Halliday has called it "an assemblage of contrasts, of light, of class, of geography." Songs emanating from prisoners dressed in sack-cloth and chained together form their own dialogue with the melodramatic flow of the narrative.