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WINNER, Golden Lion Award, Venice Film Festival, 2006
STILL LIFE
November 23, 25-26, 28-29, December 1 // 7:00, 9:15
China/Hong Kong 2006 // Director: Jia Zhangke // 108 min // 35mm
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VANCITY THEATRE EXCLUSIVE!
Jia Zhangke's capacity to astonish shows no sign of diminishing: this masterly film is one of his best. Comprising two overlapping stories, Still Life is set in Fengjie, a town on the Yangtze River, already half gone in the planned flooding caused by the Three Gorges Dam and soon to disappear forever. The images of demolition—some of which go far beyond conventional "realism" —provide a resonant context for the psychologically damaged characters, but the overall perspective is warm and deeply humane.
I entered this condemned city with my camera and I witnessed demolitions and explosions. In the roaring noise and fluttering dust, I gradually felt that life really could blossom in brilliant colors even in a place with such desperation. — Jia Zhangke
In one story Han Sanming, a man from Shanxi, arrives in the area to look for his ex-wife; it turns out that he's actually driven by a sudden emotional need to see his daughter, now in her late teens. In the other a woman from Shanghai (Jia's regular star Zhao Tao) comes looking for the husband she hasn't seen or heard from in two years; she wants a divorce...Jia's vision of present-tense China remains trouble-fraught, but the mood is cautiously upbeat: the characters reach new understandings, new bridges are built and people learn to live with their regrets.—Tony Rayns
It strikes me as Jia's finest film yet, both a docudrama with obvious social and historical relevance and a subtle, slow, quietly powerful chronicle of human loss. — Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
Jia Zhangke was born in Fengyang, China, and studied at the Beijing Film Academy. He directed his first feature, Pickpocket, in 1997, and his first short documentary, In Public, in 2001. His last four fiction features and his two feature-length documentaries have all screened at the Festival: Platform (00), Unknown Pleasures (02), The World (04), Still Life (06), Dong (06) and Useless (07).
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