Still Life

While filming Liu Xiaodong at the demolition sites in the Three Gorges Valley, Jia found himself "imagining what life might be like there". How the painter's models, like the million people forcibly displaced by the construction of the dam, strove to retain their dignity. The director decided to bring in some well-known faces (his cousin, Han Sanming, seen in Platform and The World, to play the lead role, as well as the indispensable Zhao Tao) and to recruit local actors to shoot, simultaneously with Dong, this absolute masterpiece which would win him the Golden Lion at Venice in 2006. Every shot of Still Life, which follows the parallel journeys of a miner and a nurse in this Fengjie backdrop fated to be submerged, is breathtakingly accurate and beautiful. The slow camera movements and panoramic shots convey the perpetual movement of the people, tossed around the “middle” of this Empire which is changing with unnatural speed. In this wide-ranging epic of solitudes, it might not seem out of place to see UFOs flying across the sky, or to mistake a building for a rocket…
Emmanuel Chicon

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, 2020
Ash is Purest White, 2018
The Hedonists, 2016
Mountains May Depart, 2015
A Touch of Sin, 2013
Yulu, 2011
I Wish I Knew, 2010
Stories on Human Rights, 2008
Cry Me a River, 2008
24 City, 2008
Our Ten Years, 2007
Useless, 2007
Still Life, 2006
Dong, 2006
The World, 2004
Unknown Pleasures, 2002
The Condition of Dogs, 2001
In Public, 2001
Platform, 2000
Pickpocket, 1997
Du Du, 1996
Xiao Shan going Home, 1995