24 City

Er shi si cheng ji

(China, 2008, 112 mins)

35mm

Wisconsin Premiere

writer: Zhai Yongming, Signe Baumane, Jia Zhang-ke
director of photography: Yu Lik-wai, Wang Yu
editor: Lin xudong, Kong Jinlei
music: Lim Giong
sound design: Zhang Yang
production design: Liu Qiang
executive producers: Chow Keung, Ren Zhonglun, Tang Yong
producers: Jia Zhang-ke, Shozo Ichiyama, Wang Hong
cast: Joan Chen, Zhao Tao, Chen Jianbin, Lu Liping

• IMDB Film Info

In the Chengdu province of China, massive munitions plant Factory 420 is being reduced to rubble, making way for a luxury apartment complex called 24 City. Thousands of Chinese were displaced to work at Factory 420, and the de facto community that arose around it is 24 City’s unsung casualty. This ground-level oral history catalogues the transition with the human intimacy, social scope, and tragicomic candor of a Studs Terkel project. Jia Zhang-ke (The World, WFF05; Still Life, WFF08), filmmaker laureate of China’s ever-shifting economic landscape, weaves documentary and narrative techniques to create a multifaceted portrait of a population in flux. Fictional monologues delivered by actresses Joan Chen (The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks) and Zhao Tao share screen time with genuine testimonials from factory employees, implying, as in Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, that the fictions a location inspires are as valuable as its truth. At once an idiosyncratic eulogy for China’s past and a skeptical forecast of its future, 24 City powerfully illustrates that even as the game shifts from communism to capitalism, the pawns remain the same. 2008 Cannes; Toronto; New York Film Festival.

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