Film

Park Shanghai

Park Shanghai

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Cert:(adv 12A)
Dir. Kai Kevin Huang
China , 94 mins, 2008
Cast: Yun Wei, William Feng, Wen-Ting Hou, Michael Ohlsson, Ji Roger Wu

UK Premiere

A kind of lo-fi Chinese version of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, in which several twentysomething students meet for a reunion party several years after graduation, Park Shanghai was actually begun as a university project by writer/director Kai Kevin Huang – who eventually completed the film half a decade later. It was specially selected for BIFF – along with The Search – by Ying Liang, one of the country's most acclaimed younger filmmakers (Taking Father Home, The Other Half) and organiser of the Chongqing Independent Film & Video Festival, as an example of must-see cinema from today's China. “Mostly shot on a building rooftop and featuring the blurry uniformity of the Shanghai skyline as a symbolically weighty backdrop,” according to Shanghai-based critic Morgan Short, this is “a beautifully bleak story, illustrating that no prizes are at the end of the tunnel for young people graduating to adulthood in Shanghai... Curiously stirring - a first film from a director who will no doubt go on to bigger and better things.”

Print source: Kai Kevin Huang

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