Subtitles is broken into three “chapters,” the first takes a direct look at official Communist Party banners that hang in the side streets of Shanghai’s poorest neighborhoods – the bureaucratic slogans become menacing gashes amidst crumbling homes, empty alleys and the promise of worse to come. In his second chapter, Leleu riffs on the government’s use of banners by fabricating his own, printing alternative slogans on them and hanging them himself. Photographs in the third and final chapter show blank red banners strung up in rural settings, a silent cry from nature far away from the political noise of urban China.