Excerpt

During the last twenty years, a growing body of films about China’s socialist-built cities and neighborhoods, both as full-fledged urban ecosystems in their prime and in the form of present-day remains, have gained popular and scholarly attention alike.¹ Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front Trilogy,” consisting of Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong, 2005), Eleven Flowers (Wo 11, 2012), and Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe, 2014), is exemplary of this emerging cinema. The bulk of this trilogy is set in Guiyang, a city in China’s landlocked southwest that was developed as a military-industrial base during Mao’s Third Front Movement. By restoring this socialist-built city’s past and documenting its ever-changing present, Wang brings to light the locality, history, and lived memory of the Third Front.