A Jewish Girl in Shanghai

A Second World War story unlike any other: Wu Lin’s groundbreaking Chinese-language graphic novel about the Holocaust, adapted into breathtaking traditional animation by the hugely respected Shanghai Animation Film Studio, tells the little known tale of Shanghai’s “Little Vienna”, where some 30,000 Jewish refugees sought shelter during the war years. This delicately rendered family film centers around the warm friendship between Rina, a wide-eyed European Jewish schoolgirl and A-Gen, a Chinese pancake seller, who teach each other about their distant worlds as Shanghai struggles beneath its own cruelly portrayed Japanese occupation. Cared for by a local family, Rina and her younger brother Michaeli adapt quickly to Shanghai life, until a sudden event throws the precarious balance of their lives into question once again.