24 City

Jia’s exquisite documentary/fiction hybrid examines a Chinese factory-city being dismantled to make way for luxury apartment houses. For Jia Zhangke, “history is always a blend of fact and imagination.” Fictionalized monologues, based on workers’ experiences but delivered by actors such as Joan Chen and Zhao Tao, are interwoven with real-life testimonies charting the factory’s activities from the Korean War to the present day: stories of political engagement, love, regret, and regeneration. What emerges is an elegy to a bygone city whose physical structures may be erased by the march of capitalist development, but whose memories live on.