Filmmaker Statement

‘Sealed Off’ is a story of a brief encounter, and how people unveil themselves during the seemingly ‘pauses’ of their lives. Deeply embedded within Shanghai’s history, Throughout the Japanese occupation of my hometown Shanghai in the 1930s, lockdowns occurs frequently and would imply the potential demise of the city and its people. In front of the inevitable airstrikes, the people could not do anything other than accepting their status quo. Thus, they would live on numbly and pretend that everything was still fine. This was the life that my grandmother’s family had to endure in the 1930s: the isolation, the despair, and the “lockdown” of their humanity. These themes resurfaced while I was visiting my grandparents’ house during the pandemic. It was the first time I ever heard about this traumatic period from my family, perhaps too traumatic, for my grandparents to revisit. The lockdown in the 30s was a significant period in my grandmother's life but is considerably underrepresented in modern cinema. It was always her wish to see her generation’s early life being presented and remembered. Taking inspirations from one of my grandmother's favorite short story ‘Feng Suo’ in the 40s, this film 'Sealed Off' becomes my reinterpretation. Set against the backdrop of 1930s Shanghai under Japanese occupation, the film, transcending the bounds of fiction, can also be seen as the reflection of the mentality of powerless individuals trapped in-between contradictory social values as well as the implication of the social turmoil of wartime Chinese society in the progress of modernization. My grandmother's past experiences inspired me. What propels me to bring this story to life, besides my determined passion to explore the delicacy of the human psyche, is nothing but the unique cultural consciousness and social significance behind this tragic, seemingly nostalgic romance.