Synopsis

Sisters Haohao and Zhouzhou (five and eight) spend most of their time outside of school in the electronics market of Huaqiangbei, a market in Shenzhen once known for its counterfeit electronics products but now considered the center of electronics production in China. As new migrants to the city, their parents started a 10-square-meter shop on the 9th floor of the market one year ago. In the eyes of the two sisters, the world of electronics gradually opened up to them and transformed into an imaginary world of dangerous creatures and ghost stories. The other children in the market are also spreading the word that a violent storm is coming.

Curator’s Note

Experimental documentary. The creator projects her own experience through the voiceover onto two children living in Huaqiangbei. She identifies herself as a ghost roaming at the time. （Zhaoyu Zhu）

Director’s bio

Qinyuan Lei is a Chinese researcher and documentary filmmaker. She received her PhD from the East Asian Studies Department at Princeton University in 2018. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. Alongside her academic work, she is an independent documentary filmmaker based between Berlin, Germany and Shenzhen, China. By continuing to teach and make films at the same time in Shenzhen-Hong Kong, she hopes to be part of the rise of a new generation of Chinese scholars and filmmakers who conduct innovative research on media, technology, and society in contemporary China. Committed to the idea of media-based research, she considers it her long-term goal to showcase new social research in China in media formats, and as a filmmaker to document China in changing times. THE ONE WHO RUNS AWAY IS THE GHOST is her feature debut.

Director’s Note

I migrated to Shenzhen as a child along with my worker parents in the early 1990s, a little more than 10 years into its oicial establishment in 1979. Back then, Shenzhen was a small but quickly developing city adjacent to Hong Kong; now it is a megalopolis of 20 million people and it is still growing. As a child, I frequented the electronics market of Huaqiangbei with my father, an electronics engineer. I have witnessed the boom of the market, against the greater context of the unbelievable development of my city for the last 30 years. Having left Shenzhen when I was 19, studied abroad and returned, I am drawn to tell the story of migrant children who are growing up, just as I did, in the midst of constant urban transformation, surrounded by electronics, new technologies and an uncertain future. In the documentary, I have focused on two sisters (five and eight) who have just migrated to Shenzhen, and whose parents have started an electronics shop in the market. I have woven the daily life of the two sisters together with stories of my own childhood, as well as my childish yearning to leave China, which has, inadvertently, transformed the ways in which I perceived and interacted with the sisters when we were documenting their lives in the market. The documentary features an impending storm, both in the form of stories told by the children and in the form of a real storm that was about to hit Shenzhen. The impending storm gets woven into the tales the children tell about the monsters and ghosts inside the market. I decided to feature the storm in the film, because it not only speaks to the massive urban transformation of Shenzhen, but also offers a glimpse into the powerful imaginary world of the children. I often think of childhood as a storm: it is likely to sweep one off one’s feet, it impresses one through all of the five senses, it is in everything one sees. Once the storm ends, its magic is nowhere to be found, but only to be remembered with sweet nostalgia.

Festival & Awards

Casts

Credits

Produced by Julian Moser, Co-Produced by Qinyuan Lei

Cinematography Julian Moser

Editing Henrike Dosk

Sound Mix Simon Peter

Title and Credits Animation Nani Gutiérrez

Colorist Andrea Gómez

Soundtrack Hainbach

Music Supervisor Felix Moser

Narrator Qinyuan Lei

Voice Over Writer Qinyuan Lei and Olia Qiaoqian Zhang

English Subtitle Editor Eli Wentzel-Fisher, Chinese Subtitle Editor Jolin Hiu-man Ho

Poster Design Nani Gutiérrez

Production Moserfilm