OnceUponaTimeinShanghai Format: Hardback

China, poised to become the world's largest film market, is home to an expansive state-supported movie and television industry. On an unparalleled scale, entire towns have been built around making movies. Given film censorship codes in China, period films provide a safe and familiar format to tell stories based around “official” narratives. The movie sets, rivaling real-world cities and monuments in their scale, have themselves become destinations for domestic and international tourists. Despite the fiction, they bear witness to a dynamic and changing China. Photographer Mark Parascandola, has spent five years photographing movie production sites and outdoor sets across China.

Mark Parascandola is a photographer based in Washington DC. A PhD epidemiologist by training, he uses photography to explore the interactions between human populations and their environment. Mark was awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities 2014 and 2018 and was a Finalist for the Sondheim Prize 2011 and for Critical Mass 2016. His work has been featured at galleries in Washington DC and in Spain and appears in the DC Art Bank and numerous individual collections. His exhibit ‘Once Upon a Time in Almería’ was shown at the Embassy of Spain in 2012 and has since traveled to Miami and other locations. The project was recently published as a photobook, Once Upon a Time in Almería: The Legacy of Hollywood in Spain (Daylight Books, 2017).

Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He is the author of four books on Chinese cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers.