Director
Shu Haolun
Featuring
Ewen Cheng (Xiaoli), Xufei Zhai (Lanmi), Lili Wang (Lili), Shouqin Xu (grandfather)
Genres
Drama
Country
China
Language
Mandarin with English subtitles
Release Date
2011
⏲️ 85min

Coming of Age in late 1980s’ Shanghai

Our Take

Shu Haolun‘s No. 89 SHIMEN ROAD not only vividly recalls an era of China’s history, but portrays a political crisis which long lasting effects resonate with the director personally, as much as with the experience of many youth in present day China.

Building from his acclaimed documentary NOSTALGIA (2006), also streaming as part of this season, Shu Haolun‘s first dramatic feature and coming-of-age tale presents an archetypical study of longing and change through creative interplaying of home archives, rich character cast, and narrative, both personal and political. As a result, N.89 Shimen Road vividly resurrects the experience of cultural awakening in Shanghai during the 1980s. It’s a poetic meandering on bygone days, and the fast-vanishing Shanghai neighbourhoods of his childhood.

NOSTALGIA is an ambitious cinematic essay that combines voice-over, interviews and re-enactments into a rich reflection of a city’s past and present. In paying tribute to cultural traditions before they fade into history, Shu’s work evokes a deeply moving feeling of nostalgia, “one that has universal appeal… grounded in humanist principles” (Thomas Podvin, That’s Shanghai). NOSTALGIA connects one man’s deeply intimate reflections with global societal issues.

Xiaoli has recently turned 16 in the summer 1988. The everyday numbing routine, the revisionist propaganda he’s fed at school, and the sternness of his solitary life in a crowded communal building on Shimen Road, where he lives with his grandfather, have made him wary to the idea that he may soon have to leave home to follow on his mother’s footsteps and go to America. While day dreaming of opening his own photography workshop, Xiaoli yearns for his attractive, long-haired neighbour, Lanmi, who lives next door. So intertwined are their lives that Xiaoli feels the full impact of Lanmi’s transformation from timid factory-worker to a woman determined to upper her social status. The shared circulation of noises, daily rhythms of teeth brushing and laundry drying create the landscape of Xiaoli’s growing affection for Lanmi, a desire that is totally edged with adolescent thrill. At the same time, Xiaoli is gradually aware of the political reality getting closer. Following his classmate Lili, he tries to take pictures of the student democracy demonstrations that have started in Beijing. But Xiaoli must decide where his future lies in a world suddenly robbed of stability and innocence. He uses his camera to follow Lanmi and Lili into strange new territories, to contemplate new images and sensations. His narration of No. 89 Shimen Road is a tool for passive documentation that reconstructs the home he once knew from a 2008 vantage point. Here, he retroactively reveals the truth of a moment in time.

• From 14th to 28th NOVEMBER. Watch it on Curate-it