Director: Zhang Ke Jia, PG, 111min
Stars: Tao Zhao, Sanming Han
On selected release
This year China’s controversial Three Gorges dam project will be completed; some 1.2 million people will have been relocated and the town of Fengjie, among many others, will have been submerged. Zhang’s atmospheric study of Fengjie’s final moments is a slow-burning curio – almost documentary-like in its dispassionate gaze at the dismantling of a community.
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There is little story: two people from the far northern province of Shanxi arrive in town in search of their spouses. The first is a taciturn miner looking for the estranged wife he bought years before; the second is a nurse, looking for her husband who is a big shot in construction and may or may not be having an affair. In terms of narrative, there’s not much more to it than that, but these vignettes are fascinating and exquisitely shot.