Made in China

Made in China (2009)

A confident young man with a unique style and a solid entrepreneurial spirit has made it his mission to bring the small pleasures in life to a global market. As an aspiring inventor inspired by history's most infamous jokesters, he's determined to jump through all the hoops in order to realize his dreams. When he's not taken seriously amongst the locals stateside, he takes it upon himself to travel to Shanghai and broker a manufacturing deal on his own. Lost in Shanghai, Johnson discovers that it takes more than a bright idea to succeed. It takes guts, determination, and a fist full of sneezing powder.

Date of release
2009-03-15
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (3)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Judith Krant

Casting

Interesting facts

Made in China is a 2009 comedy film co-written, directed, and produced by Judith “Judi” Krant. It is also produced by James Choi, Bronwyn Cornelius and co-written by Dan Sumpter. The film stars Jackson Kuehn, Dan Sumpter, Syna Zhang, and Deng Juan. It follows Johnson, an optimistic albeit naïve Texan, as he navigates through Shanghai's foreign streets to make his dream a reality. The title, Made in China, is a reference to the commonly found manufacturing label.

Production

The film started as an idea between James Choi and Judi Krant who sought out to make a micro-budget film together, with Choi acting as producer and Krant as director. Due to the film's cinematographer Peter Eldin's recommendation to shoot in China, where he believes it could be cheaply done, the film's co-writers (Judi Krant and Dan Sumpter) began to work on a China-centred script.

As an indie production with limited resources, initial development on the film was slow and the crew struggled to find a production company. Since receiving formal permission to film in China can be challenging the original production team was intent on filming Shanghai's old neighborhoods without approval from the local Censorship Board.

As the film's development was running on a humble budget with no legal permits, the crew had no cultural or linguistic mediators present in China, director Krant and producer Cornelius opted to arrive two weeks earlier than the rest of the crew to familiarize themselves with Shanghai. Made in China was shot on location in East Texas and Shanghai over the course of around 20 days, at approximately 10 and 25 different locations respectively.

The entirety of the film was shot using a Panasonic AG-HVX200 P2 HD handheld camcorder, which Krant and Eldin researched and chose as a budget-friendly camera that was capable of shooting in HD quality and 24 fps. Krant said: "You always want the best image acquisition you can afford and, working on a micro-budget, we were delighted by the picture quality we achieved with the HVX200".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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