24 City

That DVD design looked as if it was about a japan military story, because their military flag looks similar.

This film is like an authentic documentary. The few famous actors appeared in it did a good job. Even though you know who they are in real life, but they acted as if they were really part of that factory.

And I loved it when Joan chen spoke shanghai dialect, it is rare for a Chinese film to use shanghai dialect. It is sort of forbidden by the Chinese communist party. If hong kong was a part of China since 1949, then there won't be any cantonese films at all, because the CCP forces every film to be made in mandarin Chinese only.

I also liked it when Joan chen spoke her mandarin with a shanghai accent. she can speak perfect mandarin, but she did it to make her role more authentic.

Time is changing, I believe what those people said in this film really reflect what is happening to those factory workers who were laid off.

Zhang Ke Jai has(at least to me) grown substantially since "The World", able to leave some of the melodrama behind and let his characters and the landscapes speak for themselves. "24 City" is a beautiful film, both relevant and moving in the ways "Up In The Air" wishes it were.

A factory in Chengdu, China that has been in operation for generations is being closed down to make room for a upscale high rise apartment building called "24 City" ironically named after a poem about harmony. We follow a series of interviews with former factory workers about their lives in and around the factory.Some of the interviews could have been shortened or illustrated visually instead of having us just watching talking heads speaking over silence, but that is my personal preference.

It could be argued, by not re-creating their lives Jai gives his subjects a sense of dignity, and creates an intimacy between them and the viewer that would be otherwise lost. For the most part I would agree, though in honesty, I did get anxious more than a few times during some of these discussions. Jai's subjects at first seemed to be almost rambling inconsequentially, but as the film goes on, their statements become enmeshed in each other and the film as a whole, and intricately articulate how the factory for generations was their entire world, romantically, socially, philosophically, and culturally.

Some of the workers had their first fights there, their first loves, some moved their whole families on the promise of work, while others left their families behind, and suddenly this community which has sustained them all this time has disappeared, moved by forces beyond their control. Part of the film is documentary, but some of the interviews are "fictional" and feature actors.

I had trouble telling the difference between those who were actors and who were actual workers, but the mixture between the authentic and the dramatic only serves to highlight the contrast between the promise of worker's solidarity and justice and the realities of changing economic priorities. Jai's "The World" offered us the best metaphor for the globalized melancholic that I've yet to see, that of an amusement park masquerading as the greatest architectural achievements of humanity, while those who toil in it are increasingly alienated from any sense of "authentic" culture, themselves, and each other. That film itself, however was not as compelling as it's ideas.

In many ways "24 City" and so I am told Jai's similar, "Still Life" continue this series on the changing face of China, and the "real" people caught up in this global gentrification. What made me look at "24 City" as something other than just a clever polemic was a baffling scene of a girl skating to a soft, bubbly, trance like electronic song. The girl skates in circles, and the music plays and we just observe her, and the song continues, as the camera floats off looking across the city and the mammoth building rising up into the skyline. I don't know what if any purpose this scene had to the rest of the film, but it was lovely. Equally startling were the huge crowds of workers, by the hundreds in the film's first scenes, that are as overwhelming as the CG throngs of countless soldiers and orcs from "The Lord Of The Rings" epic battle-scapes. In those moments Zhang makes his cinematic eye, rival and better his(at least for me)binding interest in social realism.

Realism especially of the socially progressive variety is not my cup of tea (to put a borderline pathological aversion mildly), but "24 City" made, if not a believer, than a fascinated viewer out of me. If globalization has to be "hot button" of contemporary art, if there must be sad-sack post-modernist which stylistically bite the hands that feed them, if the classical Marxist themes of alienation, class, and gentrification must persist on into the next decade, we could all do worse than to see them filtered through Zhang's warm humanism (another term I would usually avoid).

It's not a thrill a minute, and there is no George Clooney smirking to enjoy, but "24 City" is rewarding, intimate, and oddly sensual, which few politicized movies, and even fewer documentaries, seem capable of doing these days. This is the first Jai I enjoyed, and makes me interested to visit the rest of the oeuvre.

Even though this kind of movie isn't my cup of tea, I need to recognize that the stories of the lives that evolved around the factory are really touching. You can see the impact the Chinese government's decisions make on those people's lifes, and it was huge.

Yet, I could notice when there was real people that worked on the factory telling their stories, and the ones that were told by actors. And I think the movie could have pointed more about the economical prejudice that the ex-empolyees had after being dismissed.

Many people who lived on the city lost their jobs to give all of it to the wealthy. However, this was something really secondary during the film, and hadn't been given properly attention.

This review is primarily in response to Barry Freed's, whose take on the film is so wildly different from mine it makes me wonder if we saw the same movie.

I LOVED this movie. I think the quasi-documentary style is wholly winning and adds a lot to the story. As far as defending Jia's decision not to do a "traditional" documentary, I guess I just have to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he had wanted to do a "traditional" documentary, then he would have done so. I feel that Jia is an accomplished enough artist that I can assume he has an instinctive sense of what will best serve a particular story. Clearly, in this instance, he decided on a fact/fiction "blend", and to my mind, he made the right call.

While watching this, I couldn't help but think of Werner Herzog and his theory of "ecstatic truth" ("I know that by making a clear distinction between "fact" and "truth" in my films, I'm able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth that most films never attain. This deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically, and mathematically correct." - W. Herzog). While I'm not (necessarily) making a comparison between Zhang-ke and Herzog, I feel that they are very much after the same thing. Whether an essential truth can be best conveyed using actors or non-actors, using a documentary or drama approach, etc. are questions that both directors obviously struggle with, and I feel that they have come to similar conclusions. They (to my mind) have opted to fuse the two approaches, in an attempt to remove intellectual and emotional barriers between the people on-screen and the people in the audience. And more often than not, that approach works, and works in a very powerful way.

Finally, I thought the performances, without exception, were utterly devastating and mind-blowing. I don't know what Jia does to his actors to get performances of that caliber, but whatever it is, he needs to keep it up. I think this is an excellent companion-piece to "Still Life", and a beautiful addition to his body of work. Masterful.

Not many Chinese films obtain a release in Western cinemas. Those that do tend to be set in the distant past and have large casts, colourful costumes and exciting action - think "Hero", "House Of Flying Daggers", "Curse Of The Golden Flower" and "Red Cliff". This is not one of those movies. "24 City" is contemporary in subject, pedestrian in pacing, and documentary in style (director Jia Zhang-ke uses a mix of real characters and actors including Joan Chen).

It is set in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, which I visited a few weeks before seeing the film and I took along two friends from Sichuan who know the city well. It tells the terribly sad tale of the closure of a factory, which once employed 4,000 workers on the manufacture of military hardware, so that the site can be used for a modern complex of apartments and hotels - the 24 City of the title.

The unusual part documentary/part fiction style - there are five authentic interviews and four fictional scenes delivered by actors - means that the work lacks the 'bite' of a real documentary and the narrative of full fiction, but the critics liked it.