French Concession

Every big city is an imaginary city, a ghost story. Who remembers the French concession of Shanghai, the carefully cosmopolitan refuge city set in a crime thriller decor, her greyhound racing, the French club, the places forbidden to dogs and Chinese ? Régis Debray has left in search of this memory, of this patch of France stuck in the heart of Asia for nearly a century (1848-1943). A combination of archive documents and video 8 shootings, the film interviews witnesses and travels through Shanghai the Sinful, torn between nostalgia and rediscovery.