24 City

24 CITY follows three generations of characters in the Chinese city of Chengdu as an industrial complex gives way to a luxury apartment complex. Though the city was once dependent these state-run factories, they are now being replaced all over the country and laying off thousands of the employees, who were once treated as heroes. Merging fiction and documentary, director and co-writer Jia Zhangke presents testimonies from former factory workers along with performances from well known Chinese actresses. For instance, Joan Chen describes her romantic loneliness as a Shanghai woman exiled in Chengdu; while Lu Liping remembers losing her son in the long trip from Shenyang. And Zhao Tao is an apparently contemptuous, striving young woman saddened by the fate of her aging working-class parents. By exlploring the factories physical destruction and the influential power of a half-century of communist rule, 24 CITY presents a pragmatic, reflective essay on modern day China . (In Mandarin with English subtitles) – L.W.