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Renowned Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke held a masterclass during Fica Vesoul, offering insights into his journey, the evolution of independent cinema in China, and the socio-political role of filmmaking. Known for capturing the realities of contemporary China, Jia spoke candidly about his early influences, creative challenges, and his vision for the future of cinema.

From VHS Tapes to Independent Filmmaking

Jia’s passion for cinema began in his school years, watching films in small VHS cabins outside the official circuit. This early exposure to Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema, including King Hu, Johnny To, and Ann Hui, shaped his cinematic sensibilities. However, his true awakening came in 1991 when he watched Chen Kaige‘s “Yellow Earth“, a film that revealed to him how cinema could express social reality beyond traditional storytelling.

His first feature, “Xiao Wu”, was made without script approval or official authorization—a defining moment in his commitment to independent filmmaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izk1noUpFp8

Jia Zhangke‘s Unknown Pleasures is a mesmerizing look at the disillusionment of Chinese youth in the early 2000s, caught between a fading past and an uncertain future. As the final entry in his “Hometown Trilogy,” the film paints a bleak yet deeply affecting picture of economic stagnation, globalization, and the slow erosion of dreams.

Set in the industrial town of Datong, the story follows Bin Bin and Xiao Ji, two aimless young men searching for purpose in a society that has little to offer them. Through its naturalistic performances, documentary-style cinematography, and subtle symbolism—such as a devastating textile mill explosion—Jia captures the alienation of a generation left behind.

In this video, we explore the film’s themes, visual style, and cultural commentary, uncovering how Unknown Pleasures remains as relevant today as it was upon release.

Anyone familiar with the filmography of Jia Zhangke will easily recognize “Caught by the Tides” as one of the celebrated director’s features. Such familiarity may well create interest and pleasure at seeing Jia revisit the characters, locales and subjects that made him famous. But this atmospheric film, in which mood and visuals prevail over plot, might also disorient and bemuse viewers who are not already intimate with his work.

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The film has been described as a career retrospective for the director, and with good reason. Stuck at home during the Covid 19 pandemic, Jia decided to review the enormous amount of footage he had shot since 2001. The images could be documentary-style footage capturing slices of life that had caught Jia’s ever-alert attention: singing crowds, swirling dancers, young people going to their favorite places, in Datong, Zhuhai, or many other places across China.

Matthieu Laclau is a French editor who has been working in China and Taiwan since 2008. His collaboration with director Jia Zhangke in A Touch of Sin won him Best Film Editing at the Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s equivalent to the Oscars. This year he edited three films in Cannes: Caught by the Tides in Competition, Black Dog in Un Certain Regard, and Meeting with Pol Pot in Cannes Premiere. We sat down with him during the festival and discussed his work on all three films. This interview is originally commissioned by Directube 导筒. The Chinese version will be published on Directube later.

The Film Stage: First, I want to congratulate you for having three films in the Official Selection at this year’s Cannes. How did you get involved with all three? Obviously, you worked with Jia Zhangke since A Touch of Sin but it’s your first time...

Across his 25-year career, Jia Zhangke has become the de facto face of independent-minded Chinese cinema — and the Cannes Film Festival has arguably been the most important institution to help him hoist that flag on the world stage.

Beginning with his 2002 drama Unknown Pleasures, the 53-year-old auteur has landed in Cannes’ main competition seven times — more than any other Chinese filmmaker in the festival’s history. Although the Palme d’Or has so far proved elusive, Jia won Cannes’ best screenplay prize in 2013 with his acclaimed anthology thriller A Touch of Sin, a searing depiction of China during its breakneck economic boom times. Jia returns to Cannes this year with Caught by the Tides, his first fictional feature since his well-regarded drama Ash Is Purest White debuted at the festival in 2018.

“A lyrical, fluid narrative,” as Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux recently described it, Caught by the Tides is composed...

Both a Venice and Cannes Film Festival veteran, Jia Zhangke is coming to Cannes packing not one but two projects – one being a bit of acting part in Black Dog, and of course, we’re more interested in the competition title Caught By The Tides — a two-decade in the making type film. Having been in competition on five different occasions, Jia Zhangke made his Cannes debut in 2002 with Unknown Pleasures, followed by 24 City in 2008. In 2010, his documentary I Wish I Knew was selected for Un Certain Regard. He captivated the festival in 2013 with A Touch of Sin, which won Best Screenplay.…...

A searching and scattershot portrait of displacement that’s as likely to resonate with Jia Zhang-ke devotees as it is to mystify those who are new to his work, “Caught by the Tides” finds the Chinese auteur returning the most pivotal characters and locations that have defined his movies over the last two decades. Then again, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never left them.

Tracing the faintest contours of a scripted love story around the scaffolding of some documentary footage that Jia has collected over the course of 22 years, this elusive chimera of a film strains to literalize the delicate relationship between time and memory — a theme that has become increasingly central to the director’s work since the Three Gorges Dam was constructed in 2006 (see: “Still Life”), submerging 13 entire cities and forever displacing the millions of people who once lived in them. Here, even...

Joy Division will mark the 40th anniversary of their landmark 1980 album Closer with a new vinyl reissue, as well as the rerelease of three rare 12″ singles.

The Closer reissue, pressed on “crystal clear” vinyl, arrives on July 17th via Rhino, which previously reissued Joy Division’s 1979 debut Unknown Pleasures on vinyl in 2019 to mark that album’s 40th anniversary.

Three long-out-of-print Factory Records 12″ singles — “Transmission,” “Atmosphere” and their classic “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” which similarly celebrates its 40th anniversary on June 27th — will also be reissued for the first time,...

Released in 1997 in its native country, Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong was a landmark independent film, considered to be the first of its kind in a post-Handover Hong Kong. Over twenty years later, it’s finally arriving in the U.S. with a new 4K restoration courtesy of Udine Far East Film Festival and Metrograph Pictures.

Drawing comparisons to the likes of Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, the story follows a high school dropout named Autumn Moon (Sam Lee) who is unsure of his future in a changing city. Made on a miniscule budget, it went on to win the Best Picture Award at the 1998 Hong Kong Film Awards and was the country’s Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

In a Mubi profile of the director, Sean Gilman writes, “In...

More than two decades after beginning work on what would become his 1997 Trilogy, Fruit Chan’s ambitious series-starting “Made in Hong Kong” is finally gearing up for its very first U.S. release. Metrograph Pictures is rolling out a brand new 4K restoration of the film, one of Hong Kong’s most beloved indies, bringing it to the big screen as it was first imagined by Chan.

In 2017, on the 20th anniversary of its release, “Made in Hong Kong” was restored by Italy’s Udine Far East Film Festival and, per an official release, was made “starting from the original camera negatives and working under the direct supervision of Fruit Chan and cinematographer O Sing-pui. The restoration is as authentic and true to the original film as possible.”

Per an official press release, the film is the “first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, [and] director Fruit Chan’s atmospheric...

Jia Zhangke’s new feature Ash Is Purest White, opening in the Us this Friday, March 15, marks the Chinese director’s ninth collaboration with actress Zhao Tao. It’s now been twenty years since the pair first began working together, on Jia’s landmark feature Platform (2000); in the interim they’ve forged what is arguably the most fruitful artistic partnership in contemporary cinema. When I wrote the following article for Fireflies #3 in early 2016, Jia’s most recent feature Mountains May Depart (2015) seemed like a culmination of his and Zhao’s work up to that point—and it was. But now we have Ash Is Purest White, which takes the years-spanning premise of its predecessor even further, and, because of the film’s meta-textual relationship to Jia’s own corpus, feels like a truly summative work. Ash Is Purest White is indeed a grand tour through the pair’s filmography, following Zhao’s resilient heroine Qiao,...

With his sprawling gangster epic melodrama Ash Is Purest White opening this Friday in New York, Jia Zhangke, the master chronicler of changing China, was in town and I was lucky enough to snag an interview. Spanning 17 years, Ash is a culmination of all of Jia's work, once again, starring his wife/muse, the great Zhao Tao in a performance that gathers more power and poignancy as the story goes along. The film ended up near the top of my favorite list for 2018 and everyone needs to see it. So without further ado: Screen Anarchy: It seems you are going back to long-form storytelling with Ash Is Purest White, harkening back to your old films like Platform or Unknown Pleasures, rather than episodic storytelling...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Directed by Jia Zhang-KeThis might be called epic in its large span of time (141 minutes), its large canvas of modern China and its grand timeless landscapes, especially that of the volcano whose ash is the reference in the film’s title.

The film opens in China at the outset of the 21st century and closes in 2018. Qiao is in love with Bin, a local mobster. During a fight between rival gangs, she fires a gun to protect him. Qiao gets five years in prison for this act of loyalty. Upon her release, she goes looking for Bin to pick up where they left off.

That would seem to encompass the story but what then ensues in the she-loves-him-he-spurns-her is their on-again off-again relationship which brings her to the final destination of running a gambling parlor in an old-fashioned place that seems totally out of place in modern day China but...

Willem Dafoe and Gael Garcia Bernal also among those called up for jury service at the 67th Cannes Film Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival has named the jury for its 67th edition, comprising eight world cinema names from China, Korea, Denmark, Iran, the Us, France and Mexico.

Jane Campion, the New Zealand filmmaker who won the Palme d’or for The Piano, was previously announced as the president of the jury, which will include five women and four men.

Cannes 2014: films

Those selected include Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director, screenwriter and producer who won Best Direction at Cannes in 2011 with Drive. His most recent film, Only God Forgives, played in Competition at Cannes last year.

Also chosen is Sofia Coppola, the Us director and screenwriter whose debut The Virgin Suicides was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 1999. Coppola, who won a screenwriting Oscar for Lost in Translation, made it into...

Tian Zhu Ding [A Touch Of Sin] (Jia Zhangke, China)

Competition

Many comments will no doubt be made about a "new" trend in Jia Zhangke's cinema. As he himself puts it, Tian zhu ding is a "martial arts film for contemporary China," paying direct homage to director Hu Jinquan (King Hu, as went his name in the West) and nourished by the vision of martial arts films like those of Chang Cheh.

The English title A Touch of Sin is a direct reference to Hu's English title for Xianü (Lady Errant Knight) or Touch of Zen, a 1970 film, selected in Cannes in 1975.*

Murder and weapons have entered Jia's world. But beyond any consideration upon "new" or "renewal," Tian zhu ding appears so strongly rooted in a set of themes, characters and concerns that run through Jia's filmography that its most striking beauties may well be in the consistency and strength of his film world.

Rome -- The Locarno Film Festival this year will present Chinese film director Jia Zhang-ke with a Leopard of Honor prize, joining home-grown filmmaker Alain Tanner as the honorees at the 63rd edition of the lakeside festival.

Organizers said that Jia, 40 -- best known for his two Palm d'Or wins in Cannes for "Ren xiao yao" (Unknown Pleasures) in 2002, and "Eris hi si cheng ji" (24 City) six years later -- would be honored Aug. 5 The festival runs Aug. 4-14 this year.

In addition to the Leopard of Honor award, Jia will be on hand to present his 2000 masterpiece "Zhantai" (Platform). The festival will also screen the Swiss premiere of "Hai shang chuan qi" (I Wish I knew), which screened this year in the Un certain regard sidebar in Cannes.