A city read like a poem — one frame at a time.
Shanghai moves at a frequency most people miss. Too fast to catch with the naked eye, too layered to hold in a single image. Streetwise was an attempt to slow it down — to find the pauses between the noise, the faces that don't know they're being watched, the geometry of a city that has never stopped building itself.
The film began as a response to the work of Patrick Schiefen, whose poetry operates in a similar register — spare, precise, alert to the texture of the ordinary. Rather than illustrate the words, the camera tries to think alongside them. Two languages finding the same silence from different directions.
Shot over several days across the streets, markets, and transit lines of Shanghai, Streetwise is less a document than a mood — the feeling of being a stranger in a city that has absorbed so many strangers it no longer notices.
Stills
