Zhang Ke Jia

Wednesday, January 9, 8pm
Platform
(Zhang Ke Jia, 2000, China/Japan/France, 154 minutes, 35mm)
The year 2000 was a banner year for Chinese film: Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Zhang Ke Jia’s second feature, Platform, didn’t receive as much notice, but it remains the only truly mainland Chinese film and the most globally relevant. Jia is fascinated by China’s modernization and move towards capitalism and Platform captures the sweeping changes of the 1980s in the lives of four friends. In 1979 they’re performing Maoist propaganda in a state-run variety troupe; by the mid-1980s Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door policy has upset their livelihood and lives. A grand tragedy of loss and home.

Wednesday, January 16, 8pm
Unknown Pleasures
(Zhang Ke Jia, 2002, South Korea/Japan/China/France, 112 minutes, 35mm)
Director Zhang Ke Jia was once asked if he was “more prone to the negative.” He responded, “I am more concerned with the people who have fallen into the margins.” In Unknown Pleasures, Jia shows us a few of those people: a handful of young adults–China's new Lost Generation–who are struggling to find roles in their frighteningly new and dynamic society. A kinetic rush of a film that's both comic and desperate, Unknown Pleasures is, as the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman described it, “a fiction with the force of documentary.”

Wednesday, January 23, 8pm
The World
(Zhang Ke Jia, 2004, China/Japan/France, 143 minutes, 35mm)
On the outskirts of Beijing lies a theme park with miniatures of the world’s great monuments from the Egyptian pyramids to the Eiffel Tower. For workers there, the metropolis of Beijing, littered with cranes and the skeletons of buildings under construction, is in the distance and the world, so to speak, is all around them. Through a series of vignettes Jia introduces the audience to the lives of the theme park’s employees, the disaffected young Chinese who are Jia’s obsession. The World is a drama that's quiet and epic, realist and absurd.

Friday, January 25, 8pm
Pickpocket
(Zhang Ke Jia, 1997, China/Hong Kong, 105 minutes, 35mm)
Does God pity the small-time crook? Do we? Shot on 16mm and filled with kinetic, hand-held shots, Pickpocket was Zhang Ke Jia’s first film. A low-budget affair, it concerns the life of Xiao Wu—which is the film’s Chinese and more appropriate title. Wu remains a small-time thief while his former friends and colleagues have parlayed their resumes into entrepreneurial endeavors applauded by the state-run media. His former best friend Xiao Yang has been named a “Model Entrepreneur” for his cigarette trafficking activities. His family is still rooted in their agrarian lifestyle and older, Maoist ways in the backwater town of Fenyang. Fenyang is, for Jia, the “original face” of China and also the setting for Platform. We watch Xiao Wu as he falls through the ever-widening cracks between China’s original face and the new China of today.