Award-winning director Jia Zhangke’s documentary Useless weaves a three-part tale about the Chinese clothing industry. The documentary opens in the textile factories of Guangdong, where workers hunch over massive machines day in day out for low pay, before moving to Paris where fashion designer Ma Ke is unveiling her new collection of organic, avant-garde, haute couture designs. Running counter to the clothing industry’s culture of mass production and reproduction, her new line “Wu Yong”, meaning “Useless”, lends the film its title, and forms the heart of the documentary. The third act of the film travels to a tailor shop in a dusty mining town in Shanxi. Using a down-to-earth montage of people and places, Useless brings out the significance of clothing, and the different faces and sectors of modern China.
Tag: CHINA
The film tells the story of a grounded American pilot during the Second World War who learns about the noble spirit of the Chinese poeple when he is rescued by the communist-led Chinese army after an emergency landing near the Great Wall. On the way to the Communist base, the pilot falls in love with a girl soldier whose lingering memory of being raped by the Japanese makes her a determined fighter. Half a century later, the American pilot returns to the Yellow River to pay his respects to the native people who rescued him.
The Days follows the life of Dong and Chun, married artists who have recently graduated from the Beijing Art Institute. Living meagerly in the hope of making enough money off their works, it soon becomes obvious to everyone but themselves that the marriage has begun to die.
A spurned lover seeks a rich man for revenge. A random onlooker — who witnessed the public assault committed by the rich man against the lover — seeks for monetary compensation for his smashed computer. The lover’s and the onlooker’s lives intertwine as two people collaborate. The onlooker’s fate faces an unpredictable turn and mirrors the lover’s life.
In ancient China, on the edge of a vast desert, swordsman Ou-yang Feng lives the life of a vagabond, controlling a network of deadly assassins. Pitiless and cynical, his heart has long been wounded by a love he neglected then lost. But as seasons, friends and enemies come and go, he begins to reflect back upon the origin of his solitude.
Durian Durian is a two-part film split between Mongkok’s Portland Street in Hong Kong and the north-eastern border region of mainland China. Ah Fan, the young girl from Little Cheung, lives in the former with her poor family, originally from Shenzhen, who illegally overstayed their three month visas to scrape together an income washing dishes and selling cigarettes. Fan meets Yan, a prostitute from the mainland, in a laneway behind Portland Street. They become friends after Yan’s pimp is assaulted in front of Fan by an assailant wielding that most dangerous of weapons, a heavy, sharply spiney-skinned durian fruit. Yan returns to the north-east to invest what she has earned after her three month Hong Kong visa expires.
Debut feature film from one of the most widely recognized directors from China’s “New Generation” of filmmakers, Ju Anqi. Filmed in Spring 1999, a gonzo camera crew roams the streets of China’s capital, asking random passersby, “Is the wind strong in Beijing?” This ambiguous question provokes a startling variety of responses that expose social and cultural anxieties within contemporary China.