Shanghai Dreams on AllMovie

A young girl living with her family in rural China finds both her father and the rapidly changing times weighing heavily on her dreams in this drama from filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai. At the dawn of the 1980s, modern sensibilities had reached to the furthest corners of the globe, but previous political obligation had forced some loyal Chinese families to move to remote border provinces in hopes of establishing a stronger line of defense against possible invasion. Qinghong's family was one such family, though her father's growing regret of having uprooted his life for an invasion that never came has been weighing heavily on his conscience. As dreams of returning to Shanghai haunt his sleep, Qinghong's father vows not to let his daughter establish roots in the remote region in hopes that when the time comes, his clan can return to the modern world from which they came so long ago. In his quest to ensure that Qinghong is ready when that time comes, he isolates his daughter by crushing her dreams with poisonous rhetoric and attempting to ensure that her crush on a local boy doesn't have the opportunity to develop into something deeper.