Still Life

Set to be submerged for the controversial Three Gorges Dam project, the two-thousand-year-old town of Fengjie proves an appropriate setting for Jia Zhangke’s look at a China in the process of both construction and deconstruction. The film follows two stories: in one, a miner (Han Sanming) searches for his wife, while in the second, a woman (Jia regular Zhao Tao) searches for her husband. Jia uses their wanderings to explore the city and its environments, his camera touchingly lingering on landscapes and people that are about to vanish or be displaced. Still Life is both fiction and documentary; it’s now a historical document, as the old city is indeed underwater.