Projects: Shanghai Tales

Shanghai Tales (2010)

Drive Thru Pictures
BBC Four "Storyville", UK (July 2010)
DR TV, Denmark (2010)
NHK, JAPAN (2010)
SMG/Docuchina, CHINA (2010)

Synopsis

Presented as a three part series of interconnected one-hour documentary films, Shanghai Tales portrays modern China through the lives of the people living in one of its busiest and most iconic cities. The series explores Chinese society via a set of topics that both compliment one another and can also easily be related to by a western or global audience. The films are built around the core facets of human nature; love and loss, progression and change, doubt and hope, happiness and melancholy. These stories provide a window into China, an opportunity to asses the similarities and learn from the differences between our cultures. The audience can empathise with the film's subjects, as their experiences and dilemmas are familiar and universal concepts: The difficulties faced developing through adolescence, the challenge of balancing work and family, and the problems encountered by tradition, marriage and the expectations of parenting. Both moving and poignant, these stories are presented in an elegant and understated style, complimenting one another to paint a portrait of contemporary China through the unpublished lives of its everyday people.

First Period

Generating a powerful and compelling narrative from the dynamics of the classroom, First Period documents a class of school children during their final year before graduating to high school. This story is an insightful look into the Chinese education system and what it means to grow up in modern China. The film concentrates on the stories of three children as they struggle to cope with the disillusion of adulthood, isolation through immaturity and the awakening of their adult sexual consciousness. While each child's story is unique, the dilemmas faced are issues that most children will confront at some stage whilst growing up. Juxtaposed with one another the narratives come together to produce a collage of the emotional and developmental obstacles faced by an average child in modern Shanghai.

All About My Friend

A portrait of the life of Lui Wei, close friend of the director and a man who epitomises his vision of Shanghai, its peoples, and life in the bustling metropolises of urban China. The film acts as a portal into urban lifestyles in contemporary China by exploring the common dilemma posed within the responsibilities of adulthood: How to cope when the benefits of a persons hard work, no longer outweigh the costs, leaving them with no time to enjoy them? Set against the commotion of a city buzzing with the lives and hopes of 20 million people, how does a man keep his life on track whilst juggling a gruelling lifestyle, his parent's health and the happiness of his girlfriend, when there are never enough hours in the day?

When My Child Is Born

An in depth tale of familial relationships in China, this moving story documents Ding Jun's struggle with depression brought on by the stresses of tradition. Recently divorced and remarried, Jun struggles to come to terms with bringing her child into a forced marriage that is already struggling financially, furthermore she feels guilt over being unable to fully commit to her new marriage due to her mixed feelings towards her ex husband. Jun's attitude towards her unborn child along with her relationship to her mother, her marriage, and in turn her mothers relationship with her own mother, provide a platform from which the film explores how Chinese customs on divorce, parenting and marriage are affecting modern relationships. Although Jun and her mother have never gotten on very well, the pregnancy now brings the matriarchal lineage of the family together as Jun's mother finds herself torn between her duties to care for her own mother, and her own matriarchal desire to be there for her daughter.

Shanghai Tales looks beneath the red veil of communist China and showcases the lives of its people. Through stories whose issues can be understood on a universal level, the films provide a point of reference from which people of all backgrounds can better understand the culture and attitudes within one of one of the fastest developing countries in the world.

Credits

Filmed, Edited and Directed by GUO  JING, KE  DINGDING
Produced by LAWRENCE ELMAN
Edited by GIGI WONG
Translation: DING JUN, GONG ZHEN
Post Production Supervisor: MARC COLLINS
Sound Mixer: JASON HEATH
Online Editor & Colourist: JACK JONES
Director Assistant: GU JING
Online Assistant: ZHANG LIANG
Production Manager: JODY COLLINS
Production Assistants: LOUISE SIMPSON, OLIVIA KEETCH, SARAH SLATER
Story Consultant: JEAN TSIEN
Producers: YANG ZHAO
Special Thanks: MIN PEILIE, HUANG HUI, SONG BANGYU, YIN BO, LI JING, YAN LIN, DONG CENG, WANG LIN, VASHTI ARMIT
Executive Producers: NICK FRASER for BBC, METTE HOFFMANN MEYER for DR, RYOTA KOTANI for NHK, JOHN LLOYD for Drive Thru Pictures

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