Watch the Trailer for Wong Kar-wai’s Blossoms Shanghai TV Series

Thanks to films like In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai ranks as one of modern cinema’s most acclaimed filmmakers. Wong hasn’t directed a feature film since 2013’s The Grandmaster, but in 2023, he ventured into the world of television to direct Blossoms Shanghai, a 30-episode drama that chronicles the hustle and bustle of ’90s-era Shanghai.

The series originally aired on China’s CCTV-8 and Tencent Video platform, where it became the country’s most streamed TV series, and now it’s coming to the Criterion Channel. From the official synopsis:

In 1990s Shanghai, fortunes are waiting to be made — but not everyone can be a winner. In his first-ever television series, legendary director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) orchestrates a sprawling cast of stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers riding the wave of market reform in the wake of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s historic reopening. At the center is the daring self-made trader Ah Bao (Hu Ge), whose increasingly risky business maneuvers intertwine his fate with those of three women, each with her own ambitions. Luxuriating in Shanghai’s food, fashion, and language, Wong delivers an exuberant love letter to his birthplace. A massively popular hit in China, Blossoms Shanghai is an intoxicating epic tinged with Wong’s signature romanticism.

Blossoms Shanghai certainly looks like a Wong Kar-wai title, thanks to the sumptuous visuals and production design on display. And it certainly looks to have more than its fair share of melodrama. But will it also feature pained internal monologues and elliptical storytelling? Non-Chinese viewers can find out for themselves when Blossoms Shanghai begins streaming on the Criterion Channel on November 24, 2025.