Jia Zhangke
Jia stayed close to his hometown of Fenyang while China transformed around it. Still Life watches towns dismantled for the Three Gorges dam; his films measure what the growth statistics leave out.
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Still Life
A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.
Defining films
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Both explore urban alienation and the sublime monotony of modern Asian cities, waiting, silence, and bodies moving through indifferent space.
Shared obsession with rural displacement and modernity's casualties, long takes that refuse sentimentality, landscapes that dwarf human struggle.
East Asian minimalists who reject narrative momentum, cinema of repetition, digression, and the quotidian made transcendent.
Both are poets of absence and economic devastation, filmmaking as witness to worlds unmade by globalization and the passage of time.
