On three nights in August, PFA presents “one of the year's most essential films” (Village Voice), a monumental work whose running time (nearly nine hours, split into three evenings) offers up untold revelations for anyone interested in the vast economic and cultural changes that China (and the world) are experiencing today, and how cinema can be used to document such transformations.

Once its country's industrial manufacturing showcase, the Tie Xi district of northeastern China saw its economy collapse in the late 1990s. Its failures became symbolic of those of the nation, with its symptoms of industrial decay, unemployment, dead-end towns, and dead-end kids. They are symptoms repeated in cities and regions across the globe, everyplace the new world economic miracle conspicuously avoided. Playing out like the nonfiction flip side of recent Chinese films like Unknown Pleasures and Shower, or a visually and emotionally rich seminar on contemporary Chinese culture and global capital, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks follows this region's changes through a three-year period, and the individuals who are blessed-or cursed-to experience them.

In Rails Wang turns his camera to the train tracks themselves, and to the homeless drifters who make their living upon them. One drifter, the one-eyed Du, and his family provide the film's emotional core, and their struggles in a landscape of abandoned trainyards, collapsing factories, and the railways that connect them all give a final, overwhelming force to Wang's monumental project.