Shadow Magic

Part of the series Power Moves: The Empress Dowager Onscreen

Shadow Magic pays charming homage to the arrival of motion pictures in China at the twilight of the Qing dynasty. Young photographer Liu is beguiled by strange new inventions from the West: first the phonograph, and then the silent movies he spies in a shabby nickelodeon set up by Wallace, a new Englishman in town. Anti-Western sentiment still runs high two years after the Boxer Rebellion was quashed, so Liu must keep mum on his moonlighting as Wallace’s cinema barker.

East and West eventually collide with explosive force in the presence of the Empress Dowager, for whom the mesmeric glow of the Lumière Brothers proves all too fleeting. Liu must risk love, family, and his reputation as he dares to bridge tradition and modernity and becomes China’s first motion-picture pioneer. Description by Cheng-sim Lim.