Shanghai Dreams, directed by "Emerging Master" Wang Xiaoshuai, centers on 19-year-old Qinghong (Gao Yuan-yuan), who lives in the rural province of Ghizhou with her parents and younger brother. Qinghong's parents came to this poor region at the behest  of the Communist Chinese government, which encouraged workers to leave the cities in order to settle in, and build up, the poorer regions. They were promised a better life, and instead have had a decade or more of poverty, factory work, and dismal rural living conditions. Qinghong's father, who was initially optimistic and happy to serve China by making the move, has in the ensuing decade grown angry and bitter, blaming his wife for talking him into leaving Shanghai. Qinghong's parents, and the other adults who came to this remote village with them, still think of themselves as being "from Shanghai", to differentiate themselves socially from the locals. The parents dream longingly of the day they will return to Shaghai, while their children have grown up in this place and consider themselves locals, thus adding an interesting layer of conflict to the t ypical teenager-parentual unit head-butting present in almost any film that has an adolescent character.

We weren't able to catch up with Little Red Flowers director Zhang Yuan before Sundance ended, but he very kindly obliged us with an email interview during his downtime at the Berlinale. Little Red Flowers is a film about a little boy sent to a boarding kindergarten in China, who refuses to let his spirit be bent by the school's rules, which are designed to make students conform to the model of an "ideal student". Cinematical asked Zhang about making a film with a cast full of four and five year old children, and what statement his film makes about the human spirit.

Making a film with one child actor can be challenging; imagine making a film set in a boarding kindergarten in post-revolutionary China, with a cast full of four-and-five year olds. That's the task director Zhang Yuan took on in bringing to life his film Little Red Flowers, which is showing in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance. The film opens with not-quite-four-year-old Quiang being dragged, literally, to a boarding kindergarten, where he is unceremoniously deposited by the man who is delivering him there. Quiang has a hard time adjusting to the strict and regimented routine of the kindergarten. The head teacher, Miss Li, and her assistants, give little red crepe paper flowers to the children who do especially well at conforming to the school's routine by learning to dress and undress themselves, obey their teachers, and poop every morning on demand.

At the heart of the film is the young actor who plays Quiang, who is so adorable and expressive the audience falls in love with him from his first moments on screen. The film has funny moments, but also heartbreaking ones as Quiang struggles (and repeatedy fails) to fit in and earn the coveted flowers. Quiang is a non-conformist in a world where conformity is highly prized, and the militaristic oppression of the kindergarten seems to crush his tiny soul. Everything in the children's lives is strictly regulated, from the precise way in which they must raise a hand to ask for more soup or rice, to the way they are expected to use the bathroom en masse, squatting in a line over a gutter-toilet, to the way their bottoms are washed, one-by-one, every night before bed. When Quiang tries to express his personality, he is called a "freak" by the other children, most of whom refuse to even play with him.