Still Life

Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, Jia Zhang-ke’s elegiac Still Life is “simply one of the best films of last year, this year, or any year to come” (Scott Foundas, LA Weekly). Still Life is set against a startling modern-day apocalypse: the demolishment of Fengjie, a two-thousand-year-old city on the Yangtze River, in advance of its flooding by the massive Three Gorges hydroelectric dam. “The film tells the story of two people in transit — a rural coal miner (Han Sanming) in search of his ex-wife and their teenage daughter, and a woman (played by Jia’s frequent muse, the luminous Zhao Tao) looking for her estranged engineer husband. The two storylines are parallel without ever intersecting, each of them offering Jia and his ace cinematographer Yu Lik-Wai many opportunities to memorialize the Fengjie landscape in all its decrepit, gutted-out majesty . . . Jia’s great subject — that of a nation making ‘progress’ faster than its own people can keep up with it — reaches its fullest and most painfully beautiful expression yet in Still Life” (Foundas). “Fantastically beautiful (the final shot is staggering), it’s likely to be classed as one of Jia’s major works” (Tony Rayns, Time Out). Colour, 35mm, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 110 mins.