HA HA SHANGHAI

“HA HA SHANGHAI is an outlier in [Choy’s] oeuvre. Far more personal than most of her other films, this documentary is a family affair that features her mother and son as characters, and her daughter Ku-Ling Siegel behind the lens. Christine herself describes the film as a ‘documentary journal,’ and while HA HA SHANGHAI begins as a personal history, it soon develops into a Kafkaesque farce. In the film, [Choy] returns to Shanghai after 30 years to search for the title of a house built by her mother. She reconnects with friends of her family and a local choir teacher. She storms into government buildings with frenetic energy, demanding to see paperwork. When things seem dire, Christine visits a fortune teller and a palm reader, grasping at straws lost to time. Through anecdotes and recollections, she interrogates the modernization of China as well as the Cultural Revolution, the events of which caused the family home to be lost in the first place. […] Although HA HA SHANGHAI is rooted in Christine’s personal experience, it tells a larger tale of how much China has changed since she left.” –Violet Columbus & Ben Klein

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