General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202612 min read

I Wish I Knew (海上传奇)

I Wish I Knew (海上传奇) is a 2010 Chinese documentary directed by Jia Zhangke in which eighteen people connected to Shanghai recount their lives across more than a century of the city's history, from the mid-1800s to the present day. It was commissioned for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, and was released theatrically in China on July 2, 2010.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director	Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯), born in Fenyang, Shanxi, in 1970, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy¹
Commission	Initiated around 2006–2008 by Shanghai Film Group president Ren Zhonglun, who invited Jia to make a film about Shanghai for the World Expo³^•⁴
Interview process	A shortlist of more than 100 names was reduced to 80 completed interviews of 3 to 5 hours each; 18 interviewees appear in the film, each on screen no more than 4 minutes⁵
Title change	Originally 《上海传奇》 (Shanghai Legend); Jia renamed it 《海上传奇》 because the stories together form a portrait of modern China, not one city⁶^•³
English title	Taken from the song "I Wish I Knew" from the 1945 film Diamond Horseshoe, sung by Dick Haymes⁷
Festival and release	Un Certain Regard, 63rd Cannes Film Festival (2010); Chinese theatrical release July 2, 2010; screened on a loop at the Expo China Pavilion from early August¹^•²^•³
US release	Kino Lorber, limited theatrical release February 14, 2020; 100% Tomatometer from 16 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The film begins in Shanghai in 1842, with the Treaty of Nanjing, the document that opened the city as a treaty port. From there it lets the legends and sorrows of the city unfold through testimony rather than chronology. Jia Zhangke interviews eighteen people whose lives are tangled with old and new Shanghai: Chen Danqing, Yang Xiaofu (son of the assassinated reformer Yang Xingfo), Du Meiru (daughter of the gangster boss Du Yuesheng), Zhang Xinyi (great-granddaughter of the statesman Zeng Guofan), Wei Ran (son of the actress Shangguan Yunzhu), Fei Mingyi (daughter of director Fei Mu), the actress Wei Wei, the filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and, youngest of all, the novelist and racecar driver Han Han.²⁰ Between interviews, Zhao Tao walks through Shanghai's demolition zones, construction sites, and new developments, silent and unhurried, a living link between the voices and the city they describe.²¹

One date keeps returning: May 27, 1949, the day the Communist army entered Shanghai and took the city from the Nationalists. For almost everyone in the film it is the hinge of a life. Some stayed, some fled to Hong Kong or Taiwan, and the testimonies are mostly about one or the other, exile from the city or arrival in it.²² Yang Hua-ding recalls the wild last days of the Republican era, speculating in securities and carrying his winnings around in suitcases. Wang Peimin tells the starkest of the departure stories: her father died in 1948, three weeks before she was born, executed after being given a death sentence.²²

The most viscerally powerful chapter belongs to Wang Xiaohe, a martyred revolutionary, told entirely by the daughter who never met him. She was unborn when he was killed and learned who her father was only from other people's accounts and from newspapers. She describes the first time she was shown the newspaper photographs, taken minutes before his execution: her father with his head held high, smiling. Jia puts those grainy photos on screen and holds them there while she speaks, and the interview becomes something close to a meeting between father and child, arranged by a camera seventy years late.²³

Other segments are quieter but just as haunting. The soprano Barbara Fei recalls her father, Fei Mu, and the circumstances in which he made Spring in a Small Town, the most revered of all Chinese classics.²⁴ Wei Wei, who stayed in Shanghai and starred in that same film, talks about the city's golden age of cinema.²⁵ Wei Ran describes the tragedies that befell the family of his mother, the actress Shangguan Yunzhu.²⁴ Hou Hsiao-Hsien speaks about making Flowers of Shanghai, and a retired laborer remembers starring in a 1950s propaganda film as a "model worker."²⁴^•²¹

The Taiwanese filmmaker Wang Toon delivers the film's most cinematic memory. Fleeing to Taiwan by boat during the Cultural Revolution, he stood on the Bund while his grandmother tied each member of the family by a single rope at the waist, so no one would be lost in the crush. He later recreated that scene in his own film Red Persimmon (1996).²⁵

The film closes in the present, back among the cranes and the Expo grounds, with Rebecca Pan, who left Shanghai in 1949. She tears up, takes a moment, and then sings a song from her younger days.²¹^•²⁵ The accumulated voices, partial and contradictory and unadjudicated, are left standing side by side as the only honest portrait of the city.

Characters

Zhao Tao (Zhao Tao), Jia's partner and muse, appears in wordless linking shots, walking through Shanghai's development zones as the city's present tense and its quiet conscience.
Han Han (Han Han), the youngest interviewee, a novelist and racecar driver who later became a filmmaker himself with The Continent (2014), in which Jia makes a cameo; Reverse Shot calls him the film's hero.²⁵
Rebecca Pan (Rebecca Pan), the singer and actress who left Shanghai in 1949 and later appeared in Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild, the film's emotional closer.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and Wong Kar-wai (Wong Kar-wai), the two great Chinese-language directors of the diaspora experience, appear as interviewees rather than subjects.
Wang Peimin (Wang Peimin), daughter of the executed revolutionary Wang Xiaohe, gives the film its most devastating testimony.

Interpretations and controversies

The film was commissioned by Shanghai's 2010 World Expo, an official celebration, and yet it is full of politically charged material: executions, the Cultural Revolution, the mass flight of 1949. TIME reported that despite this critical content it played at the Expo several times daily, and speculated that a sympathetic censor, or officials' calculus about bad press, might explain why it was never banned.²⁶ Critics also debated its accessibility: The Hollywood Reporter called it "a patchwork quilt with too many fabrics and patterns" and argued that overseas audiences are left adrift in a sea of non-chronological memories.²⁴

Origin and commission

The project began when Ren Zhonglun, president of the Shanghai Film Group, telephoned Jia Zhangke around the end of 2006 with the idea of a film about Shanghai to mark the World Expo. Jia first proposed an omnibus film with several directors he admired, but judged the plan too large to operate, and took it on alone.³ Jia later said the commission was not a "命题作文" (assigned topic): he was free to film whatever he wanted as long as it concerned Shanghai, and he decided on a documentary.²^•⁵

His deeper motive was historical. Jia had long been interested in Shanghai's role in modern Chinese history, particularly the revolutionary years of the 1920s and 1930s, and had prepared for years a feature film about Shanghai in 1927, at one point intending to adapt André Malraux's 1932 novel La Condition humaine, before finding the rights unavailable. Finding written sources abstract and lacking detail, he turned to oral testimony from people who had lived the events.⁵

The interviewees

Jia and the painter and film scholar Lin Xudong conducted the interviews together, drawing up a list of more than 100 candidates on the principle of seeking only participants in historical events, not scholars, and completing 80 interviews. Each person spoke for 3 to 5 hours, from birth to the present, but the film presents only the most important fragments of 18 lives, with each interviewee on screen for no more than 4 minutes.⁵

The eighteen span several groups. They include living "old Shanghainese" such as the film actors Wei Wei and Rebecca Pan (潘迪华) and the writer Zhang Xinyi (张心漪); descendants of old Shanghai figures, including Fei Mingyi, daughter of the director Fei Mu; Du Meiru, daughter of the Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng; and Wei Ran, son of the actress Shangguan Yunzhu; Shanghainese who grew up in the People's Republic, among them the national model worker Huang Baomei, the painter Chen Danqing, and the writer Han Han; and outsiders with strong Shanghai ties, such as the Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wang Toon (王童).³ The financier Yang Huaiding, known as "Yang the Million," also appears, recounting the opening of the financial markets in the 1990s.⁵

Jia wanted the subjects to speak Shanghainese, relying on Lin Xudong, a Shanghai native, to bridge the language, and Lin and Chen Danqing served as consultants on the city's history. Chen Danqing's opening childhood memory of lane life, describing Shanghai as an immigrant city of mixed and hidden family backgrounds, sets the film's impression of the city.⁵ Jia regretted that interviewees connected to the four great families of Republican Shanghai all withdrew at the last moment.⁵

Themes and structure

Jia's stated core idea was the passivity of individual fate: over more than a hundred years, he said, Chinese people's lives have been excessively shaped by politics, war, and disaster, and he wanted to present and in some sense change that condition.³ He refused a glamorous image of the city, saying he wanted to show Shanghai's "base color," which he defined as parting, death, and the constant coming and going of people.³

Structure as suspense. Jia described the film as having a suspenseful, dreamlike quality carried by its structure rather than by central characters. The emotional weight is distributed across a group whose fates echo one another: the model worker Huang Baomei rises while the actress Shangguan Yunzhu sinks; Hou Hsiao-hsien speaks of a patriarchal society in which men had no romantic love, while Zhang Xinyi recalls free love in 1930s Shanghai. A second kind of suspense lies in unfamiliar details inside familiar historical events.³ The narrative is non-chronological, moving between decades including the Cultural Revolution, the Kuomintang's anti-communist purges of the 1930s, and the rush toward capitalism in the 1990s.⁷

Rivers and wandering. The film's principal visual element is water: close views of the Suzhou River, Huangpu River ferries, the Kaohsiung ferry in Taiwan, and Hong Kong's Star Ferry, images of boats of people arriving and leaving that Jia called the only unchangeable spaces of the city.⁵ The actress Zhao Tao, Jia's frequent lead, wanders the city's streets and the Expo park as a recurring, almost spectral presence linking the segments.⁹^•¹⁰

The film also intercuts the interviews with archival photographs, propaganda films, previously censored footage, and excerpts from fiction films by directors including Lou Ye, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Wang Toon, placing private memory against the media that recorded the same era.¹¹^•¹² Unlike 24 City (2008), its closest companion piece, there are no fictional interviewees played by actors; all eighteen speak as themselves.⁷

Title

The film was completed as 《上海传奇》 (Shanghai Legend) and renamed at the last stage. Jia explained that the stories, though all tied to Shanghai, together form a miniature of modern China, so a single city's name was too narrow; "海上" (on the sea) carried more openness, and the rivers and the sea are what remain when the old lanes are demolished.³^•⁶ The English title comes from the American song "I Wish I Knew," from the 1945 film Diamond Horseshoe, heard in the film as sung by Dick Haymes while Shanghai seniors dance to it; Jia found the title fitting for a film about lives shaped by history.⁷^•¹³

Release and reception

The film premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 63rd Cannes International Film Festival in 2010.¹ Its Chinese release on July 2, 2010 was preceded by a false report that the film had been banned, which Jia attributed to a postponed press conference after the release date slipped.² From early August 2010 it was screened on a loop at the Expo's China Pavilion.³

Reported running times differ by version: the Shanghai premiere ran 116 minutes,⁵ Time Out listed 138 minutes,¹² and Film Comment described the 2011 US festival version as a 118-minute director's cut about 20 minutes shorter than the Cannes screening.¹⁴ Rotten Tomatoes lists the 2020 US release at 2 hours 5 minutes.⁸

The film reached US theaters only in February 2020, distributed by Kino Lorber, a decade after Cannes, and drew a 100% Tomatometer from 16 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.⁸ Critics received it as an elegiac companion to 24 City: Glenn Kenny called it "an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times," and Jonathan Romney placed its images of sleepers as a prelude to Jia's later films A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart, and Ash Is the Purest White.⁸ The BFI characterizes it as somewhat unfocused, mixing citizens' recollections, film history, and symbols of the city's global status, and suggests it is best viewed after his fiction features.¹⁵

Place in Jia Zhangke's career

Jia has described the film as a turning point in his subject matter. His first creative period, from his 1996 short through 2008, responded to a rapidly changing reform-era society; after Still Life (2006), and especially with I Wish I Knew, he says he turned his gaze toward history.¹⁶ He also called it the most exhausting film of his career, prepared over three years with visits to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.¹⁷ In a later interview he grouped it with his oral-history documentaries, noting that the group-portrait method of I Wish I Knew, carried by a dozen or more voices, continued in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020).¹⁸ By 2019 he reported that many of the elderly interviewees, including Wei Wei, Fei Mingyi, and Du Meiru, had died in the intervening decade, taking their direct experience of old Shanghai with them.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026