Once upon a time in Shanghai

China, poised to become the world's largest film market, is home to an expansive state-supported movie and television industry.

On an unparalleled scale, entire towns have been built around making movies.

Given film censorship codes in China, period films provide a safe and familiar format to tell stories based around “official” narratives.

The movie sets, rivaling real-world cities and monuments in their scale, have themselves become destinations for domestic and international tourists.

Despite the fiction, they bear witness to a dynamic and changing China.

Photographer Mark Parascandola, has spent five years photographing movie production sites and outdoor sets across China.