Chongqing’s real estate bubble attracts rural girl Yana with promises of wealth and privilege. She opens a foreigner rental agency to provide Chinese real estate developers with ‘white monkeys’: foreigners who help real estate companies market their new developments, the infamous ghost towns – dressed in costume, sometimes performing (badly). From the laughable ‘Britishville’ to the world’s largest aquarium complete with mermaids, it’s all intended to demonstrate progress and prosperity, but tellingly most of the developments are empty. Yana struggles to reconcile this ruthless absurdity with her rural roots. The director (a rent-a-foreigner himself) offers an insider’s view and an outsider’s perspective on “the biggest building boom in human history” and provides a chronicle of the Chinese Dream.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
David Borenstein is an American director currently based in Copenhagen. He has directed films for ARTE, Al Jazeera English, Horisonts, NYTimes, and more are underway. A China scholar, he received PhD training in Anthropology at the City University of New York. He began developing China Dreamland while on a Fulbright scholarship in China to study urbanization and real estate speculation. David speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese.
His other film during a previous festival edition is Rent-a-Foreigner in China.