Still Life

The New New Wave
Of all the great films coming out of China these days, none are more representative of "the real China" than the movies of Jia Zhang Ke. Combining a semi-documentary approach with an occasional touch of surrealism, his hi-def digital video renditions of the lives of ordinary Chinese adapting to the most vertiginous change in the history of the world are eye-popping and achingly beautiful. A must for anyone who cares about the cutting-edge of cinema.

Digging Up the Past, Burying the Present, Building the Future.
"Still Life" was written and directed by Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke, who brings a documentarian's style to this fictional drama inspired by the upheaval that the incredible Three Gorges Dam project has created. Two people from the city of Shanxi travel south to what is left of Fengjie to look for people from their past. Han Sanming (Han Sanming) is trying to find his ex-wife who took their young daughter and left him 16 years ago. Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) hasn't heard from her husband in 2 years and journeys to Fengjie, where he is a manager for the Demolition Authority, to confront him. Fengjie is a 2000-year-old town in the process of being demolished in 2 years, as it is gradually flooded, with much of the Old City already submerged.

"Still Life" is shot and scripted in a "cinema verite" style with a conspicuously slow, contemplative pace. It doesn't ever speed up, but it did eventually lull me into its languid universe. It is a mediation on people's...

Transcends Linear Plot Driven Films
For American Audiences who don't like the unfamiliar feeling of a different language and location can feel at home with the political decisions that damned the homes, neighborhoods, and residents in the film who out of desperation work in unsafe working conditions. Director Zhang Ke Jia does however leave viewers with a positive feeling of the human bonds the workers find with each other on the battle field of life.

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