Parkland of Decay and Fantasy

104 minutes | 2022 | Docu-Fiction/Experimental | Mandarin and Italian | English Subtitles
Canadian Premiere

Content Advisory: This film contains tobacco use and disturbing content.

Nestled on Shanghai’s Changxing Island, an amusement park that once thrived in the heyday of the 1990s has faded into obscurity. The man-made architectural ruins have turned into a haunting relic for some who linger in the past, and attractions to some others who are nonconformist outliers in pursuit of spirituality.

With a heart to be mindless on the frontiers between fantasy and reality, fiction and documentary, cinema and moving images, ZHU Chenliang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) was a MFA graduate from the film directing program at California Institute of the Arts. In January 2021, he moved to an abandoned amusement park in China and spent ten months there in the community to develop his debut feature, Parkland of Decay and Fantasy. It was a process that constantly shifted between intuition and logic to let the story slowly emerge from the characters. The film had its World Premiere at CPH:DOX New:Vision Competition 2022 and its Asian Premiere at 16th FIRST International Film Festival (Xining, China). On October 10, 2022, Zhu was selected as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2022 by Filmmaker magazine. Currently, he is working on his second feature film, Controlled Act of Absurdity in Real de Catorce, Mexico.