ZhaoTao Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.

I'm glad I didn't give up on Jia Zhangke. Several months ago, I reviewed his 2000 film Platform, which was so difficult to watch that I ended up skipping the screening of his most recent film, The World, filmed in 2004. Lucky for me, The World came back to Seattle for a one-week only run this week, and even luckier for me, I was able to work it into my schedule to catch it. The World is the kind of film Jia Zhangke should have been making all along, had he had the freedom to do so.

The Chinese director's first three films were made when he was an "underground" director; he was filming without the sanction of the Chinese government, he had to film quickly, and he never knew, when he was filming shots in public locations, if he would be shut down. His previous three films, Xiao Wu (1998), Platform, and Unknown Pleasures (2002) were all banned in China. Jia was part of a group of young filmmakers fighting for greater freedom in filmmaking, and the government finally announced new policies that loosened the chokehold a bit, allowing Jia to film his first "mainstream" Chinese film.