24 City

From AsianWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

User Rating

Nobody voted on this yet

You need to enable JavaScript to vote

Profile

Movie: 24 City
Chinese: Er shi si cheng ji / 二十四城记
Director: Jia Zhangke
Writer: Jia Zhangke, Yongming Zhai
Producer:
Cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, Yu Wang
World Premiere: May 17, 2008 (Cannes)
Release Date: March, 6 2009 (China)
Runtime: 107 min.
Language: Mandarin
Country: China

Plot

Chengdu nowadays. The state owned factory 420 shuts down to give way to a complex of luxury apartments called "24 CITY". Three generations, eight characters : old workers, factory executives and yuppies, their stories melt into the History of China.

Director's Note

This film is made up of interviews with five workers, who share their real-life experiences with us, and of fictional monologues by three women. I decided to integrate documentary and fiction in this parallel flow because this seemed to me the best way of representing the last half-century of Chinese history. As far as I’m concerned, History is always a blend of facts and imagination.

The stories of these characters, both real and fictional, center on a state-owned factory which supplies the Air Force and other sectors of the military. The factory was founded 60 years ago, and was moved to Chengdu City 50 years ago. It has weathered all of the successive political movements under communist government. I’m not interested in chronicling this history as such, but rather in seeing how a century of experiments with Socialism has impacted on the fate of Chinese people. To understand the complexity of the social changes, we need to listen to the direct and in-depth testimonies of the people who have lived through them.

Present-day films rely more and more on action and movement. In this film, I wanted to return to spoken language. Here, narration is taken as a kind of movement to be captured by the camera. I want to allow the narration to provide access to the speakers’ innermost feelings and experiences.

Whether, in the best of times or the worst, no individual’s experience should be neglected. In this film, we hear from eight Chinese workers. I think it is more than likely that many who see the film will hear echoes of their own lives. -- Jia Zhang Ke