24 City

Er shi si cheng ji

(China/Hong Kong/Japan | 2008 | 107 mins | 35mm)

35mm

Exec. Producers: Chow Keung, Ren Zhonglun, Tang Yong
Producers: Shozi Ichiyama, Wang Hong
Producer/Writer: Jia Zhangke
Writer: Zhai Yongming
Cinematographer: Yu Lik Wai, Wang Yu
Editor: Li Haiyang
Sound: Zang Yang
Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Lim Giong
Cast: Joan Chen, Lu Liping, Zhao Tao

China's eminent filmmaker Jia Zhangke (UNKNOWN PLEASURES, SFIAAFF '03) returns with an exquisite documentary/fiction hybrid that innovatively explores the still lives inhabiting Factory 420, a 50-year-old state-owned airplane munitions plant. The factory is a virtual city within the city of Chengdu, and is slowly being dismantled to give way to luxury apartment houses. Through interviews, both real and staged, its workers, many of whom have spent their entire lives within the confines of the factory's shops, schools and dormitories, narrate how its walls have come to embody China's modern history.

As the once-self-contained factory community is torn down, a collection of voices reveals the cycles of life that have sustained it over the decades. Fictionalized monologues are woven within real-life testimonies charting the factory's activities from the Korean War to the present day: stories of political engagement, love, regret and regeneration. In one fascinating sequence, actress Joan Chen plays Gu Minhua (a worker once fancied for her resemblance to Chen herself), and who is now living in the shadow of a love lost. Indeed, as Jia has commented, History is always a blend of fact and imagination. What emerges here is an elegy to a bygone city whose physical structures may be erased by the march of capitalist development, but whose memories live on.

-- Chi-hui Yang

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Sponsored by

Co-presenters

Chinese Historical Society of America