Dead Pigs

Dead Pigs (海上浮城, 2018) — watch online Cathy Yan's debut feature about five lives colliding in a rapidly modernising Shanghai on iFILM. The Chinese drama-comedy premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and introduced Western audiences to the director who would later make Birds of Prey.

The film hooks itself to a real incident: in January 2013, thousands of dead pigs floated down the Huangpu River into Shanghai. Yan uses that surreal headline as a centrepiece for five interlocking stories — a pig farmer wiped out by the mass die-off; his sister who runs a salon in a building a developer wants demolished; a busboy hoarding tips for a private dream; an expat architect reshaping the city skyline; a bored rich girl crossing paths with all of them.

What Yan captures is Shanghai at a specific historical pressure point — old neighbourhoods flattened overnight, money moving faster than people can process. The tone shifts between deadpan comedy and something genuinely melancholy without losing its grip on either register. For a debut, the control is striking. Stream Dead Pigs (2018) online on iFILM.