Welcome to Destination Shanghai
Andrew Yusu Cheng
Release year: 2003
Run time: 86 mins
Film type: Fiction
Synopsis
In the city that was once considered to be the “Paris of the East”, amidst the crumbling buildings and the obvious decay of social values it is clear that here everyone has their price.
A young man looking to become an escort finds himself in the thick of the male prostitution industry and “boy toy” to a client who dabbles in the S&M scene. An aspiring yet aging actress and news reporter dons a white coat and sells the service of “reconstructing hymens” to help support herself and her son, a disturbed boy who was born out of a marriage of convenience when his mother married a gay man after the Cultural Revolution.
What has become of this once glittering city? A harsh and all too realistic insight into how easily a city’s moral fibre can deteriorate.
Director biography
Since 1997, Andrew Yusu Cheng has been a key initiator of the Chinese DV film movement. His films Shanghai Panic and Welcome to Destination Shanghai were screened at over 30 film festivals, won prestigious prizes at Rotterdam (Grand Prix FIPRESCI), Vancouver ( Dragons and Tigers), Berlin (Nomination Award), exhibited at MoMA, the Lincoln Centre, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, and broadcast on BBC, Channel Four, CBS, and China’s Central Television Station.
In 2014，Andrew Cheng’s road movie Zero Thousand Li under the Clouds and Moon was listed in Time Out’s 100 Best Chinese Films of All Time , as voted by international experts on Chinese cinema.
Andrew Yusu Cheng is the recipient of Australian Prime Minister’s Australia-Asia Endeavour Award, and holds a PhD in Film and Television from the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, as well as a PhD in Chinese Philosophy and Buddhism from Peking University. He is currently is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Australia.