Jia Zhangke

b. 1970, Fenyang, Shanxi

Film director

Jia Zhangke is known as the filmmaker of contemporary Chinese castaways, people caught between the backwardness of the countryside and the modernity of urban culture. He left his native town at eighteen in order to study painting in the provincial capital of Taiyuan. In 1993, Jia entered the Beijing Film Academy and graduated in 1997. He was one of the founding members of the Youth Experimental Film Group in 1996. However, he subsequently returned to Fenyang to film his movies that, despite their ‘local’ characteristics, address issues of a more global, even universal nature. Jia very soon established himself as one of the major independent filmmakers in China. His first short (a video), Xiao Shan Going Home (Xiao Shan huijia, 1995), won the Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Award.

The award secured the necessary financing for his first full-length feature, Little Wu or Pickpocket (Xiao Wu, 1997), the story of a youngster unable to cope with the dramatic changes happening in China. The film was shot with non-professional actors and won a NETPAC prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998. Jia’s talent for describing the change from a revolutionary to a market culture was confirmed in Platform (Zhantai, 2000), a story that begins in 1979 and ends in 1990 and represents the coming of age of the director. His most recent film, Unknown Pleasures (Ren Xiaoyao, 2002), locates its young protagonists between a hedonistic present and a thoroughly commercialized future. In line with his interest in contemporary society, Jia is also involved in the production of documentaries (e.g. In Public, 2001, about a small mining town in Inner Mongolia).

See also: New Documentary Movement

Further reading

Berry, Michael (2003). ‘Cultural Fallout’. Film Comment (March/April): 61–4.

MARIA BARBIERI