We'll Always Have Paris

Paris is not necessarily the first choice as a setting for a ghost film; the cultural symbols of the French metropolis are simply not suitable as a backdrop for haunted stories due to their excess of romance. Not so in Ella Raidel's four-minute short film, which was created as part of her extensive research project Of Haunted Spaces and refers to an upcoming feature film project. In We'll always have Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, stately fountains and trimmed hedges stand as faux French in the hazy rainy weather of Tianducheng. Located in the suburbs of the Chinese megacity of Hangzhou, the housing estate is one of the countless, largely uninhabited pop-up locations that have been created by accelerated real estate speculation. In Raidel's film, the Eiffel Tower is the anti-gravitational center of a phantom zone populated with naked high-rises, parking lots and gardens - an urban assertion that comes to nothing. While the camera focuses on the building clone and its surroundings from various perspectives, the film suddenly changes its register.