美丽上海 | Shanghai Story

The Kang family was once well-off, owning a garden house in Shanghai, until catastrophe befell them in the late 1960s. The four adult children of the family are now scattered and residing in three places: Shanghai, Inner Mongolia and San Francisco. When the mother is suddenly hospitalized, the children return to see her. The family reunion, however, is anything but a happy event: the four siblings are unable to even have one peaceful dinner together, and the mother herself has serious matters to settle with all of them.

Directed by Xiaolian Peng | Starring : Joey Wang, Zhenyao Zheng, Youliang Zhao, Josephine Koo, Yuanzheng Feng | Presented at Shanghai Film Festival

假装没感觉 | Shanghai Women

After Women’s Story, Peng returns to the most straightforward representation of women’s issues in Shanghai Women, a film about three rural women. As the first work in Peng’s Shanghai Trilogy, Shanghai Women describes the problem that women encounter trying to secure urban (residential) space through the story of women from three generations: a grandmother, mother and a daughter, Ah-xia. Fed up with her philandering husband, the mother decides to divorce and moves with Ah-xia to grandmother’s. The grandmother lives with her son, with his wedding on the horizon. Grandmother’s becomes too cramped for comfort because of the larger family. To secure their place, mother accepts a reluctant marriage arranged by the grandmother, with Li, who lives with his son. Li is nitpicking, stingy, and even violent and finally the mother and Ah-xia leave the place together. The mother considers a remarriage with her ex-husband but Ah-xia encourages her mother to make their own future together and find their own place. The film reveals the realities of an urban divorced woman and her insecure life if she leaves her husband’s house in a scene where mother and daughter ceaselessly wander about creek-side areas in Shanghai.

Directed by Xiaolian Peng | Starring : Liping Lü, Haiying Sun, Zhenyao Zheng, Wenqian Zhou, Jing-ming Shi | Presented at Cairo Film Festival, Nantes Film Festival