General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Shanghai Dreams (青红)

Shanghai Dreams (青红, also known by the working title 我十九, "I Am Nineteen") is a 2005 Chinese drama film directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, set in the early 1980s in Guiyang, Guizhou province, where a Shanghai family relocated under China's Third Front policy struggles over whether to return to Shanghai¹^•². It competed at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize².

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Wang Xiaoshuai, China, 2005¹
Award	Jury Prize, 2005 Cannes Film Festival (in competition)²
Setting	Early 1980s, Guiyang, Guizhou; a family moved from Shanghai in the 1960s under the Third Front relocation policy¹^•³
Principal cast	Gao Yuanyuan (Wu Qinghong), Li Bin (Fan Honggen), Yan Anlian (Wu Zemin), Tang Yang, Wang Xueyang, Qin Hao⁴^•⁵
Key crew	Screenplay Lao Ni and Wang Xiaoshuai; cinematography Wu Di; editing Yang Hongyu; producer Pi Li²
Runtime	About 120 minutes (festivals list 120, 121, or 123 minutes)¹^•⁴^•⁶
Chinese release	Passed censorship April 1, 2005; released in mainland China June 3, 2005⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Story

The film opens in the early 1980s in Guiyang, where bell-bottoms and permed hair among high school students signal the first changes after the Cultural Revolution era⁵. In the 1960s, countless urban Chinese workers heeded the government's call to leave the cities and follow factories inland, part of the "Third Line of Defence" policy that dispersed essential industry in the face of a threatened Soviet invasion⁵^•⁹.

The heroine, nineteen-year-old Wu Qinghong, has grown up in Guizhou with her parents and her brother; that is where her friends are and where she first experiences love². Her father, Wu Zemin, after more than a decade in the province still sees himself as a temporary resident and navigates the factory's bureaucratic channels to gain a transfer back to Shanghai, hoping to secure a brighter future for his children⁵. He keeps Qinghong on a very tight rein for fear she will become attached to life in the remote, mountainous province¹.

Qinghong receives a pair of red high-heeled shoes from a local factory worker, Fan Honggen, with whom she is enamored; to her father the shoes are a sign that his daughter is laying down roots in a town he intends to leave⁵. She senses that something is not quite right with Honggen's fanatical courtship, and a great drama is revealed only step by step¹. The film ends with the crack of a firing squad executing prisoners; the boy who loved Qinghong is shot for rape, and three gunshots echo across the landscape³^•¹⁰.

Background and autobiographical basis

Wang Xiaoshuai draws on his own reminiscences. His family was relocated from Shanghai to the poor, mountainous province of Guizhou as part of the authorities' decision to install fortified industrial cities near the border with the Soviet Union³. Wang was born in Shanghai and moved with his parents, who joined the Third Front construction, to Guiyang at two months old, growing up there until age 13¹⁰. He has called the film his autobiographical movie, about history he witnessed¹¹.

The script existed from the 1990s. An early version, titled 《我19》 ("I Am 19"), told two generations' stories, including Qinghong's daughter's; Wang ultimately cut the narrative so that Shanghai remains only a dream¹⁰. In interviews he explained that the film's basis was two things he heard after leaving Guiyang: several families from his father's factory who fled overnight back to Shanghai in the early 1980s, and stories resembling Qinghong's told by former classmates¹².

Production and censorship

The film was shot on film in 2004 and completed in 2005¹³. Production was financially precarious: the first investor withdrew mid-shoot, the crew left Guiyang in debt, and DVD rights were sold early; after the Cannes award, overseas box office of nearly 1.2 million yuan recouped the domestic cost of the 10-million-yuan production¹⁴.

Passing censorship was itself a milestone. On April 1, 2005, China's film censorship board issued its approval decision, making Shanghai Dreams the first film of Wang's 12-year career to receive theatrical release in China and his first to enter an international festival through the normal procedure of obtaining approval first⁷. The first submission on March 24 was rejected with four revision notes about overly stimulating images and sounds; changes included modifying gunshot sounds and a brief nudity shot, and the second submission passed in nine days⁷.

Release and reception

After the Cannes award, the mainland release was moved up from August to June 3, 2005⁸. Commercially the film fared poorly at home: per Maoyan data its cumulative box office was only 110,000 yuan¹⁵.

Critics responded to its portrait of the displaced Shanghai community. Philip French in The Guardian described it as a distinctly Chekhovian film in which exiled factory workers pine for Shanghai as their 19th-century Russian equivalents longed for Moscow, and noted the recurring image of Qinghong sitting silently on her bed while her father storms up and down the corridor outside⁹. Peter Bradshaw wrote that the movie upends the usual clichés about the younger generation yearning for the big city and has "a granite severity and sombre force"⁴. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 60% Tomatometer from 5 reviews and a 62% audience score from more than 500 ratings¹⁶.

Place in Wang Xiaoshuai's work

Shanghai Dreams is the first part of what became Wang's Third Front trilogy, followed by 11 Flowers (我11, 2012) and Intruder (闯入者, 2014), films revisiting life in Third Front factory towns¹⁷. Wang has said the chronological order of his own growth story runs from 11 Flowers to Shanghai Dreams to Intruder, but the Shanghai Dreams script had existed since the 1990s, so it was made first¹⁸. The film also marked his move from underground to officially released filmmaking after the 2003 policy shift that allowed formerly banned independent directors to produce through their own companies¹⁸.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2000 to 2009

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

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