Harbin Echoes
Harbin Echoes
A film by Thomas Lahusen; 45 minutes; color; Chinese and English, English subtitles; digital HD 16:9; Harbin (China), In production.
Once a city of Russian colonial dreams, Harbin, in North-East China, had many foreign residents during the first half of the twentieth century: Russians, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, and many other nationals from Tsarist Russia came to Harbin to build and operate the Chinese Eastern Railway. During the Russian Civil War, more émigrés found refuge in the city. Between 1932 and 1945, representatives of diplomatic and business interests from Great Britain, Germany, France, the USA, as well as Korean settlers, and the Japanese who eventually occupied the region and established the puppet empire of Manchukuo, all added to the international texture of the city that was called, at times, the “Paris of the East.”
The multicultural mosaic is gone, but the city is still engaged in a cultural dialogue with its past: the persistence of memories reveals itself in fascinating collages. Numerous domes and graceful arches of old buildings, built by Russians and other Europeans, echo endlessly in the domes and arches of the new high-rises and official buildings. A few surviving Orthodox churches, synagogues, and mosques share the city with Buddhist and Confucian temples. In amidst the insane honking traffic of cars, buses, motorcycles, and pedicabs, the multitude of Chinese stores adorned with colorful signs share the street with McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Russian souvenirs, made in China. Harbin mothers with beautiful toddlers and groups of young people in their Western clothes with cellphones glued to their ears walk past old peddlers and fortunetellers, sitting on the streets as they have for generations. The construction boom has not yet entirely destroyed the old streets and its Chinese Baroque buildings with their mysterious inner courtyards. The modern bustling and growing city of some eight million residents remains a place of memories, of dialogues, of old and new domes striving towards the vault of heaven.
