Jia Zhangke
Yi Yi, a white-collar worker in a lattice room, and Ah Juan, a female worker in a garment factory, are separated by a wall in a Dongguan factory. They do not know each other, and seem to have no relationship with each other's fate, but because of the appearance of a "peacock", seems to have intersected. The two girls' souls meet and make their own answers to life on their own way to chase their ideals. The story is adapted from the song "Peacock" by the band Frog Pond, paying tribute to every woman who also carries ideals in the midst of the ordinary.
In Close-Up, Jia explores the counterpart to the wide shot. Four elevated surveillance cameras scan a busy traffic intersection, capturing the steady stream of cars, bikes and pedestrians that cross it. Amid all that bustle and movement, a fifth camera with a long telephoto lens picks out one individual. A man with a bandaged hand. A wide shot changes into a close-up. Visitors have the freedom to choose their own context and focus. They can even tell the story of this man. HD video installation on 5 screens, colour, silent
Explores the turbulence amongst scholars, bandits and local officials following the abolition of the imperial examination system at the end of the Qing Dynasty.
The closing film for 2021's Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival.
Filmmaker Jia Zhangke chronicles his local literature festival in Shanxi, China which includes a multi-generational roster of the country's most esteemed writers.
In 2003, Han Dong, a teenager who dropped out of high school, arrives at Beijing with a dream of becoming a journalist.
A film director wanders the world alone after breaking up with her boyfriend, finally gaining inner peace.
In "Spaces #2", 7 internationally acclaimed directors shot, after commissioning by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, a short film at home, making their own timely comment on the new reality that we live in. The project is inspired by the book "Species of Spaces" by the French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist, Georges Perec and the days of quarantine. The idea is to create a film at home, using the environment, the people or the animals in that space. The only outdoor areas that may be used are outdoor living spaces, such as the terrace, the garden, the balcony and the stairwell. "Visit" is Jia Zhangke's submission.
Jia Zhangke is starring in his first lead role, appearing as an artist facing a midlife crisis in Cheng Er's Pseudo Idealist.
He has a unique, impenetrable face. He's also an artist of many different facets. Takeshi Kitano embodies the new Japanese cinema, the archetype of the merciless Yakuza, but he is also a subversive visual artist, an unbridled TV comedian, an instigator of the conservative Japanese society... After dissecting artists like Guy Maddin, Yves Montmayeur creates this portrait of one of the most important auteurs in contemporary filmmaking.
In A Song for You – a road movie and a music industry insider comedy, with lots of songs – young Ngawang leaves behind a nomadic existence on the Tibetan plateau for big city Lhasa nightclubs. His dream is to record an album and be heard around the country. Cutting an album costs money, which he doesn’t have. One day he meets a woman who looks just like his Loyiter, a talisman of the goddess of art and music. Impossible, says his father, as only the pure of heart meet her, only in their dreams. But, Ngawang perseveres. She takes him on a journey of discovery through life and love.
What gifts would your parents prepare when your Chinese New Year visit comes to an end? A film about the taste of home shot on iPhone XS.
The 43rd edition screens Neighbors, with five segments about the theme “neighbors”: not only about physical proximity, but also about relationships. In Brazil, Olga is a 90-year-old black woman who lost her husband one year ago; her neighbors, who come from different parts of the world, interrupt her grief. In Russia, an employee tries so hard to please his boss that he becomes inconvenient. An Indian woman, with the help of her male friend, decides to learn how to drive, an uncommon practice for women in the country. In China, an elderly, owner of an old and decadent barbershop, argues with his son, who wants to change the business. In South Africa, a group of homeless fights for the right to housing.
Set in China's underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows a dancer who fired a gun to protect her mobster boyfriend during a fight. On release from prison 5 years later, she sets out to find him.
Han Dong adapts his own 1998 novel, about a group of young poets accidentally caught up in an inexplicable dispute with local hoodlums and security guards.
Revive is one of five short films within the Jia Zhangke-produced omnibus film Where Has Time Gone? with contributions from each of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). In Jia’s segment, a Chinese couple in the ancient town of Pingyao attempts to breathe new life into their old love as they ponder having a second child. Pingyao, home to the film festival Jia has co-founded, is a highly picturesque UNESCO World Heritage Site, and Jia humorously plays with a very recent dilemma – the second child policy dates from only 2013 – in a setting itself forcibly revived from history.
A short film omnibus featuring the work of five directors representing five countries involved in the 2017 BRICS summit, an annual international relations conference held between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The collection—taking the concept of time as a unifying theme—depicts the economic, political, and social alienations and contradictions that create, compound, and structure issues as wide-ranging as poverty, class stratification, and homeless; familial distress; spousal abuse; and natural disaster.
Jia Zhangke brings to this edition of the Beautiful series The Hedonists, an engaging drama about several unemployed Shanxi coalminers looking for work.
Jia Zhangke's short film for Greenpeace East Asia depicts the effects of air pollution in northeast China, a region frequently blanketed in dangerous levels of air pollution. 'Smog Journeys' traces two families from two different backgrounds; one a mining family in Hebei province, and the other a trendy middle class family in Beijing. Both face a similar fate. Air pollution is one of China's most pressing environmental and health issues. Greenpeace calls for a shift from coal to clean renewable energy, as well as short term measures that better safeguard people's health.
The life of Tao, and those close to her, is explored in three different time periods: 1999, 2014, and 2025.
An abandoned tumbledown theater in the outback of Paraíba state is the initial setting of a film about cinema, which explores the testimonials of the novelist and playwright Ariano Suassuna and other filmmakers such as Ruy Guerra, Julio Bressane, Ken Loach, Andrzej Wajda, Karim Ainouz, José Padilha, Hector Babenco, Vilmos Zsigmond, Béla Tarr, Gus Van Sant and Jia Zhangke. They all respond to two basic questions: why do they make movies and why do they serve the seventh art. The filmmakers share their thoughts about time, narrative, rhythm, light, movement, the meaning of tragedy, the audience‘s desires and the boundaries with other forms of art.
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Four independent stories set in modern China about random acts of violence.
Young Chinese parents Chen Xuesong and Cai Weihang find their marriage eroding as they deal with financial troubles, jealousy and constant bickering. When Weihang finds a photo of Xuesong and her ex-boyfriend, things spiral out of control.
In memory of the Japanese earthquake on 3.11, each director presents a 3 minute and 11 second short film in tribute to those who were lost that day.
Focuses on the people, their stories and architecture spanning from the mid-1800s, when Shanghai was opened as a trading port, to the present day.
An ancestral city; through its delicious botanical garden and its branched canals, we observe the clues and traces of its ancient culture. Two couples of men and women, former lovers, meet again one year later. The yesterday's breath of youth is still perceptible in their conversations. Is it still possible for us to love? Does youth really have an end? Like the networks linking the old city, what type of ecological existence does their culture require? Written by Venice Film Festival
Throughout ten years of a key era in Chinese and Hong Kong history, a girl becomes fixated on a fellow commuter who she observes regularly. While the two never speak to one another, the girl captures her appearance and life changes during the years through various means such as photos and drawings.
Observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.
Leading Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns home to Fenyang in Shanxi province after winning the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for Still Life (2006). The experiences of his childhood, the people he grew up with, and the changing landscape of his home town gave Jia the inspiration to make his first films. The documentary forms a poignant inquiry into the past of the director's life and Chinese society at the same time.
Chen Chuan (Francis Ng) is a simple man who seems to be cursed with bad luck all the time. Convinced by a blind fortune teller that he must eliminate the "villain" that is bringing him the ills, Chen vows to kill the person responsible for his misfortunes. But he soon has second thoughts when he suspect that the "villain" is none other than his own wife.
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.
China's greatest living filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) travels with acclaimed painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China's Three Gorges Dam project. In DONG, Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being "de-constructed" by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu's paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects' shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.
A film about Chinese underground filmmakers who were the first to express their truthful and realistic views on China from 1989 until today. It is also the first film to speak about the Chinese homosexual film scene. The documentary features Chinese intellectuals and directors such as Cui Zi’en, Jia Zhangke, Ju An Qi, Li Yu, Liu Bingjian, Liu Hao, Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan.
Meet Wang Yuelun, a young and ambitious Chinese who dreams of becoming a film director. Filmmaker Elisabeth O. Sjaastad follows an eventful year in his quest to fulfill his dream.
Three disaffected youths live in Datong in 2001, part of the new "Birth Control" generation. Fed on a steady diet of popular culture, both Western and Chinese, the characters of Unknown Pleasures represent a new breed in the People's Republic of China, one detached from reality through the screen of media and the internet.
A documentary about Peking in the dawn of the new Millenium. Contains interviews with Jia Zhangke and dj Gaohu
A fragmentary landscape for a little train station in a suburban area and a bus stop in a mining town. A lonely soldier in his heavy coat, a tired old man, a bubbly young lady, a punk, a woman waiting in the street... From all those different people in these unfamiliar places, we can feel the exhaustion of every life.
Shows a market where puppies are bought and sold. Several puppies are placed in a cloth bag, and they struggle to break free. One bites through the bag, pokes his head, and is observed in his triumph and then confusion.
The movie is set in the remote chinese province of Fenyang, and spans the turbulent 1980s by following four performers in the state-run Peasant Culture Group. We see the group evolve from workers that are restricted to approved revolutionary classics that praise Chairman Mao, through performance of western classics, after china adopts an 'open door' policy, and the effects on their lives.
Little pocket thief Wu never got away from the streets like his friends did. He realises that he is alone, as his old buddy doesn't invite him for his wedding. When he falls in love with a hooker he is forced to think about his future. Can he break with his criminal past?
Xiao Shan, a temporary worker at the Hongyuan Restaurant, has just been fired by his boss Zhao Guoqing. Deciding to leave Beijing and returns to his home in Anyang, he goes to see a series of people from his hometown who have also been living in Beijing-construction workers, train ticket scalpers, university students, attendant, prostitutes-but no one wants to go back with him. Dispirited and confused, he searches out one after another of his old friends who are still in Beijing. Finally he leaves his wild long hair, the symbol of his life in the city, at a roadside barber stand as his offering to Beijing.
An old Chinese woman visits Japan to find her missing daughter whom she adopted in post-WWII China. Her granddaughter and a retired Japanese policeman join her search.
Xuanzang, a Tang dynasty Buddhist monk, visits a Central Asian/Indian country populated only by women.
The movie tells the story of a restaurant owner (played by Duan Yihong) who's chased after the murderer of his son for seven years. On the way, he met a young man (played by Shi Pengyuan) with a complicated background. Amidst suspicion and temptation, the relationship between the two began moving in an unexpected direction.
Artist 1994 focuses on art students in the early 1990s, a time of liberalization and radical cultural change in the country.
