Shanghai Gloaming (2006)

Amidst its garish neon lights, eight-lane superhighways and Blade Runner-esque skyscrapers, that's Shanghai today. No other city in the world has experienced the incredible velocity of change that has occurred in Shanghai since 1990 - the year Deng Xiaopeng gave his official blessing for the city to re-emerge as China's trading and financial center. Since Shanghai's re-birth, more than 4,000 new skyscrapers have been built (with another 300 currently under construction). Its population has increased by 23 percent to 16.4 million, making it the world's fifth largest metropolis. And its economy has grown at an annual rate often double that of China's turbo-charged national average of 7-8 percent. Once a gray, oppressive Communist metropolis, Shanghai is now - as a Time magazine cover story recently proclaimed - "The Hippest City in Asia" For the last five years, the Canadian photographer, Greg Girard, has been working on a project that represents his attempt to document these incredible changes. Every night at twilight, Girard heads out with his large format camera to document the old houses, apartments and residential lanes that have been disappearing as a result of Shanghai's relentless growth. What Girard's project is concerned with is not just the disappearance of the historic buildings that were erected before the Communists came to power in 1949. But the disappearance of a singular, Shanghainese way of life. "I'm documenting the people who live beneath the bright lights, the shadow of the city" says Girard, a soft-spoken Canadian who has worked in Asia for the last 25 years. "The people who are being left behind and yet whose lives are being affected the most." Today, Shanghai exists in a window between two worlds; a new city is rising as the old Shanghai disappears. In the film, we follow Girard as he photographs the end of one Shanghai - and the beginning of another. We will take viewers into a Shanghai that outsiders never see. Into the old Art Deco and Art Nouveaux villas, houses and apartments designed by the British and the French in the early 1900s where the majority of Shanghainese have lived since 1949. It is a world of cramped living quarters, shared kitchens and common stairwells. A world that became even more over-crowded when hundreds of thousands of workers and their families were forcibly moved into these old buildings during China's Cultural Revolution. It is this world that is, in many ways, the soul of Shanghai. The only life the residents of this city knew for the half-century between Shanghai's liberation by the Communists and its ascension to its current position as China's most modern metropolis. To have grown up and lived in these old, densely populated houses built by foreigners is, for many, the essence of being Shanghainese. Whereas other Chinese cities were ancient villages that became towns that became cities under Communist urban planning, Shanghai was a fully realized foreign city that was effectively taken over by its Chinese inhabitants. It is this foreign-built environment that gives Shanghai its unique character. And in the old lanes and alleyways of the former French and International Concessions, Shanghai exists much as it has for the last 50 years. Neighbors gossips with neighbors they have known for decades, the elderly sit outside their tiny apartments playing mahjong and children help their mothers with laundry at the outdoor sinks or do other after-school chores. It is an urban existence unlike any other. One shaped not only by colonialism, Communism and the tumult of China's Cultural Revolution - but also by an urban landscape unlike any other in all of China. Yet as skyscrapers continue to rise above these old lanes and the city continues its untrammeled march toward its singular brand of hyper-modernity, it is a Shanghai that is disappearing by the day. The film will follow Girard on a journey from the old disappearing Shanghai to the new Shanghai that emerging in its place. Articulate, intellectual and passionate about the project that has been his obsession for the last five years, Girard will serve as both the film's subject and its narrator. Though the film's structure is that of a traditional documentary - with distinct sequences where Girard interviews the different characters as he goes about photographing them for his project - the script will take the form of an essay. As we see Girard at work, interacting with the characters, his voiceover will explain why does what he does. Why photographing these old houses and the Chinese who inhabit them - these people "who live beneath the bright lights" - is more than just an attempt to document the end of one era and the beginning of another. It is a search for a city's soul. And through that search how he hopes to understand not only where Shanghai has come from, but also where its future will take it.