Photo: Mubi
In the spring of 2013, more than 16,000 rotting pig corpses floated down the Huangpu River, the “Mother River” whose tributaries feed Shanghai’s water supply. Public outrage and an official investigation followed, eventually tracing the pigs to Zhejiang Province, about 60 miles outside the city. The animals had died of a disease called porcine circovirus that officials insisted was not contagious to humans, and a tangle of regulations amid a crackdown on black-market pork had led farmers to dump the remains rather than pay the government fees to dispose of them. The incident highlighted the contrast between Shanghai’s prosperous, ultramodern facade and forgotten rural communities devastated by pollution and neglect the subject of writer-director Cathy Yan’s debut feature,
It can’t be said that this movie’s title is false advertising. Cathy Yan’s 2018 feature, coming to streaming in the U.S. this week, opens with a wide-eyed pig farmer coming home from a virtual reality demo to find one of his prize animals unexpectedly turned into an ex-pig. Old Wang (Haoyu Yang) is first befuddled, then highly dispirited as the rest of his animals go the way of all diseased flesh. He, like other pig farmers in the increasingly overdeveloped Shanghai, dumps the useless corpses in a nearby river, where they keep popping up. Like metaphors.
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Dead Pigs review – winding tale of life in cash-crazed Shanghai Peter Bradshaw
A breezily westernised style of Chinese movie is on offer in this 2018 debut feature from Chinese-American film-maker Cathy Yan, who two years later went to Hollywood to direct Birds of Prey, starring Margot Robbie. Dead Pigs is an ensemble dramedy set in Shanghai that satirises – in a distinctly lenient way – the commercialism eating away at China’s heart. It is inspired by a real-life incident in which thousands of dead pigs were found in the city’s Huangpu river, dumped by poverty-stricken farmers who couldn’t pay the disposal fees; the pig symbolism reminded me a tiny bit of Alan Bennett’s A Private Function.
12 Feb 2021
Last year, everybody wanted to know who Cathy Yan was. The DC Extended Universe had just been given a gutsy makeover with Harley Quinn’s solo outing
Birds Of Prey, and Yan was the director to thank. She had made just one feature before a fizzy social satire called
Dead Pigs. Those lucky enough to catch the film at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where it premiered before being released in China wouldn’t have been surprised by the high-octane success of
Birds Of Prey. But for the rest of us? Watching
Dead Pigs in 2021, thanks to a belated streaming release, feels like travelling back to the future: this story is new, but we already know how good Yan’s own journey continues to be.