I Wish I Knew

A documentary about Shanghai. The film chooses no single way of telling the city. Eighteen people are interviewed and each tells their own story: a worker, a former soldier, a director, a gangster's daughter, a family that moved to Taiwan and a businessman who went to Hong Kong. The accounts do not complete each other; at times they contradict. The city has changed hands several times from the 1940s to today, and each period left its own story. Some of those speaking come from cinema. They talk about their own films and passages from those films cut in; the image of the city moves between fiction and record. A woman appears between the sections. She walks in crowds, passes through building sites, stands by the river. She does not speak and we are not told who she is. In the background the city is constantly demolished and rebuilt. The narrative uses that building not as a set but as the subject itself. It was made during the period of the city's great exposition and was read as a counter-voice to the official account of that time. Jia Zhangke directed. A strong production for anyone who likes contemporary Chinese cinema and documentaries about cities. For a viewer expecting a straight historical account, the film is deliberately fragmentary and does not proceed chronologically.