"Once upon a time in Shanghai’ sets a strong and confident frame around the last days of ramshackle Shanghai, a notorious slum of Baku whose bowed and painted walls skirt an operating rail line’s single track. Like the trains rumbling slowly through Shanghai’s unusual narrow main street, the neighborhood’s stories come into fleeting view, granting glimpses of individual lives and of a place that seems almost timeless, at once impermanent and without end."