I Am Somebody

A young man travels from his home town to Hengdian, where the country's biggest films are made. He wants to be an actor. Life there turns out to be hard, and very few ever get past being extras. Derek Yee wrote and directed it. The most striking thing about it is the casting: the leads are not known actors but people actually working as extras there, while the familiar names appear only in brief walk ons. The film, in other words, was made from inside its own subject. It opened the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2015. It looks at the industry from below rather than from outside.