Programmed September 2021

China Lost and Found: Eight Films by Jia Zhangke

Featuring Walter Salles’s 2014 documentary Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang Among the greatest filmmakers working today, Chinese master Jia Zhangke is the foremost chronicler of the vast changes that have transformed his country over the last half century in its transition from communism to a globalized, increasingly market-based society. Working without state approval on his early underground Hometown Trilogy— Xiao Wu , Platform , and Unknown Pleasures , all set in the province of Shanxi, where he grew up—Jia transitioned to state-sanctioned filmmaking with 2004’s The World , but his films remain deeply critical of China’s modernization and the disillusionment it has wrought among the country’s youth. Employing rigorously composed long takes, unblinking naturalism, and audacious narrative structures, Jia captures the ironies, ennui, and often surreal metamorphoses of a country suspended between the past and an accelerating future.