24 City
Director: Jia Zhangke
Genre: Docudrama, Drama, World cinema, LGBT
Year: 2008
Country: China
Language: Chinese language, Standard Mandarin
Starring: Zhao Tao, Lu Liping, Joan Chen
24 City (Chinese: 二十四城记/二十四城記; literally: The Story of 24 City) is a 2008 film directed and co-written by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke. The film follows three generations of characters in Chengdu (in the 1950s, the 1970s and the present day) as a state-owned factory gives way to a modern apartment complex. The film was also known as The Story of 24 City during production.
The apartment complex featured in the film is an actual development (also called "24 City") built on the former site of an airplane engine manufacturing facility. Jia will also produce a documentary about the location.
The film's narrative style is described by critics as a blend of fictional and documentary storytelling, and it consist of five authentic interviews and four fictional scenes delivered by actors (but presented in a documentary format).
24 City made its debut shown in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Film Comment, official journal of the Film Society of Lincoln Center listed the film at the end of 2008 as the 2nd best unreleased (without US theatrical release) film of the year.
The Hollywood Reporter called the film a "moving elegy to modern-day China" and said of the
(This is information generated from a Wikipedia article, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.)
"Jia Zhangke’s last feature, Still Life (2006), was set in Fengjie, an ancient river city flooded and rebuilt as part of China’s monumental Three Gorges Dam Project; his latest, 24 City, takes place in and around a giant, formerly-top-secret aircraft plant in Chengdu City, Sichuan. Again, the subject is displacement. Having been purchased by a state-controlled real estate developer, China Resources, Factory 420 is slated for demolition. More precisely, it will be converted into a luxury housing complex named 24 City—condos at a cost of only 20,000 jobs. 24 City is largely oral history, real and invented. It’s mainly populated by retired workers, posed in situ and talking about their lives—flesh-and-blood monuments of Mao’s China. But 24 City is not exactly cinema vérité. Jia originally planned to make two movies about Factory 420, one fictional and the other documentary. To the discomfit of many critics, however, the two modes merged in a single work: 24 City is more obviously documentary than most of Jia’s fiction films, and also vice versa. Three of the interviews are staged. Released a few months back in China, it has proven to be Jia’s most commercially successful film, but it’s not an easy movie to read. What is one to make of the casually revealed information that the movie itself was partially financed by 24 City’s developer? Have we been watching a kind of infomercial? Is there irony or pathos in the juxtaposition of retired workers enthusiastically singing “The International” as their factory collapses?"
Quoting J. Hoberman, SF Weekly