Still Life

The fact that the Venice Film Festival held a place open for this film and then awarded it the Golden Lion, one of world’s cinema’s most prestigious prizes, demonstrates Jia’s international stature as China’s most important and innovative filmmaker. (Of course, we knew this when we screened his previous film The World as one of the highlights of AFF05.) Set against the flooding of massive tracts of land as part of the Three Gorges Dam, Still Life is the story of two characters, a man searching for the wife he abandoned sixteen years ago, and a woman looking for the husband who ran out on her. Both stories are played out against the surreal backdrop of a village in the process of demolition as it sinks beneath the rising waters. Jia works imaginatively in digital video to capture the rough texture of contemporary Chinese life, providing a vital alternative to the bloated costume epics that have outlived their time in Chinese cinema.

The characters emerge with their dignity and stubbornness intact, human sticking points amid the rush and chaos of the New China.

Dave Kehr