"Shanghai Waiting for Paradise" is another beautiful documentary by film director Sylvie Levey and I was lucky enough to get last night a seat at one of the first screenings, organized by the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club.
Originally meant as a portrait of a Shanghai family whose live was going to change dramatically because of the ongoing demolishing of old Shanghai. In the end the process took over five years and the documentary developed into a very intimate look of a very Shanghainese family, and probably a way of life that is disappearing very fast.
The documentary is literally dominated by those very powerful Shanghainese women who rule their families as their empires. In that way it depicts very nicely the relation between those dominant women and that other very Shanghainese feature: their domesticized husbands. Father Wang was working his butt off as a tailor, 365 days a year, to make a rather poor living. In the discussions the expectation for what a man should do were raised to an unachievable level: a real man would have bought us a house. And then turning to father Wang: you have never been able to buy us a house, so you are not a real man.
Father Wang suffers mostly in silence and do what all Shanghainese men do: accept their ordeal. Shanghainese women often complain to non-Shanghainese men about their local men, how little they achieve and that they are no real men. They conveniently forget that they have create this spineless creature in the first place themselves.
Earlier Sylvie made two other beautiful documentaries. One on Jin Xing, a former PLA-colonel, China's first transsexual and now a famous choreographer. A second "High Crimes in Shanghai", on Shanghai's only prison for female inmates.
Sylvie Levey has kindly accepted our invitation to join our speakers' stable at Chinabiz Speakers, so if you are interested in her as a speaker, do drop me a line.
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