SHANGHAI DREAMS (QINGHONG) Asian New Classics

Winner of the Prix Du Jury at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, SHANGHAI DREAMS is acclaimed director Wong Xiaoshuaii’s (BEIJING BICYCLE, DRIFTERS) exploration of his post as port of o generation of children whose lives took root in the realm of their parents’ displacement.

In the 1960s, countless urban Chinese workers heeded their government’s call to leave the cities and follow factories inland. SHANGHAI DREAMS opens in the early 1980S, as signs of revolution ore mode evident by the bell-bottoms and permed hair of high school students in Guiyang. Young Qing Hong receives a pair of red high-heeled shoes from a local factory worker with whom she is enamored. For her father, Loo Wu, the shoes are a sign that his daughter is laying down roots in a town where, after more than a decade, he still sees himself as a temporary resident. Wu navigates the bureaucratic channels of the factory, trying to gain a transfer back to Shanghai with the hope of securing a brighter future for his children. Qing Hong grows increasingly isolated from her family and peers, straddling the divide between the locals and those “outsiders” like her father who hold steadfastly to the dream of a home in a distant city.

Wong Xiaoshuai balances the quiet desperation of a young woman in love, with the iron willed dreams of her father, in a tale of dislocation and confinement that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful.