A little while ago, I mentioned about Shanghai’s independent film makers. While they represent the growing mass of the Independent Film Industry here in Shanghai, the majority were foreigners. I ran across an interesting article by Lisa Movius that details the efforts of Chinese Filmmakers.

There are more and more experimental films coming out of Shanghai these days. While in Beijing the trend for independent filmmaking is towards feature length and fully developed films, this is not so prevalent in Shanghai. The community in Beijing was brought up around the culture of entertainment, especially with Peking Opera and the like.

Back when Shanghai used to be second only to Hollywood in filmmaking, the world had it’s eyes on Shanghai to produce some amazing films. Produce it did, but after the Cultural Revolution, the entire Industry ran away to Hong Kong and Beijing. Beijing followed a cookie cutter type plan to churn out countless TV programs and films, while the remains of SMG produced a lot of politically motivated content.

These days, the viewers are driving the content to new levels. People are realizing they need to start making better content, especially to compete with the foreign content “leaking” into the country. Independent filmmakers are also taking this opportunity to show their skills, and that they can produce the same or better quality than the media giants.

You can see many examples of exploratory and art filmmaking throughout Shanghai, such as the current exhibition at the Museum of Comtemporary Art entitled Love@Fiction. There are plenty of videos you can watch that I think border on the insane. Strange videos of a woman wrapped in plastic wrap with a tinfoil hat, a computer generated image of a girl wearing an animal costume that performs a metamorphasis into another animal. It is just really weird stuff. 

Eventually we will start to see a great deal of “normal” type independent films coming out of Shanghai, along with the artistic type. It also seems investors are more willing to put their money into a Shanghai production because the filmmakers in Shanghai tend to be the serious ones, where in Beijing, filmmaking is done so rampantly, it’s hard to tell what is good and what isn’t.