6th Generation

One of the greatest films of this decade.

Jia Zhang Ke is one of the most talented young directors working today. This might be my favorite of his work, perhaps because I can relate to its characters the most. I love his gritty neorealist style that captures the lives and problems of people in a time and place that is undergoing huge social and economic changes. The story is about two teenage boys with no goals, directions, or future. They have no jobs and little money. They feed off of pop culture such as Pulp Fiction and Chinese pop songs, when their lives couldn't be farther away from these distractions. Jia's pacing and plotlessness might turn off some viewers, but his concern is realism, which he uses to capture the social-economic alienation and spiritual malaise of the one-child-per-family generation.

The film tells two parallel stories of two people searching for their families in the vicinity of the presently-completed Three Gorges Dam project- a massive hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River that submerged entire towns and displaced 1 million people, just another cost in the modernization of a nation. However, the loss of their people's homes serves as a background. The film charts the tolls of modernization on the family structure of the protagonists. One woman looks for her husband who she hasn't seen or talked to for 2 years because he was sent to manage the project. The film looks great, as Jia uses the grand vistas of the Three Gorges to full effect. Like his other films he uses mostly nonprofessional actors for realism. There are some curiously surreal moments which I'm not sure how they fit into the film.

Dong

The companion piece to Still Life is even more bizarre. It's a documentary that when seen with Still Life mocks the barrier between fiction and documentary. Jia's films always had a edgy documentary feel to them, and this complements those films perfectly.