Film Festival 09 - 24 City
24 City
Er shi si cheng ji, China 2008, 107m
Director: Jia Zhangke
Festivals: Cannes (In Competition), Toronto, New York, Vancouver,
San Sebastian, London 2008; Rotterdam 2009
Jia Zhangke (The World, Still Life) continues to be the filmmaker
whose work tells us more - and speaks more eloquently - than any
other about the vast upheaval of contemporary Chinese society.
"Shot in Chengdu before the earthquake, Jia's new film is a
masterly combination of fact and fiction. The fact: a once-secret
military hardware factory and its workers were moved deep inland in
the late 50s to protect them from a perceived Soviet threat. Now an
aeronautics plant, it has shed many staff and is moving to a
greenfield site, yielding its prime location to a luxury
flats/shopping mall development called '24 City'. Jia explores the
old site as it's demolished and talks to former and present workers
about their experiences. The fiction: four of the workers (three
women, one man) are played by actors. The words they've been given
amplify the human cost of what the workers went through: forced
relocations, broken families, political U-turns. Jia once again
humanises China's modern history - and turns it into poetry." -
Tony Rayns
In Mandarin and Shanghainese, with English subtitles
