Jia Zhangke
Based on Wikipedia: Jia Zhangke
In 1991, a young art student named Jia Zhangke wandered into a cinema in Taiyuan, China, on a whim. He had no particular expectations. The film playing was Yellow Earth, directed by Chen Kaige, one of the pioneers of what would become known as China's Fifth Generation of filmmakers. By the time the credits rolled, Jia's life had changed completely. He walked out knowing exactly what he wanted to do: make films.
This is the origin story of the man widely considered the most important Chinese filmmaker of his generation.
The Underground Years
China's film industry operates differently from Hollywood or European cinema. The government maintains tight control over what gets made and shown through a state-run bureaucracy. To make a film legally, you need official approval. To screen it in theaters, you need official approval again. This system has created a fascinating phenomenon: underground cinema.
Jia Zhangke spent the first phase of his career as an underground filmmaker. Not because he was hiding from authorities in some dramatic way, but because he simply made his films without asking permission. He shot them, showed them at international festivals, and accepted that Chinese audiences would never see them in theaters.
His first feature, Xiao Wu, tells the story of a pickpocket in Fenyang, the small city in Shanxi province where Jia grew up. The film cost about fifty thousand dollars to make. That's not a typo. Fifty thousand dollars. For context, the average Hollywood film today costs somewhere around sixty-five million. Even low-budget American independent films typically run into the millions.
What could Jia possibly capture with fifty thousand dollars?
Everything that mattered, as it turned out. The film premiered internationally and became a sensation on the festival circuit. It landed Jia a deal with Takeshi Kitano's production company. More importantly, it established the themes and style that would define his career: a documentary-like eye for ordinary Chinese life, especially the lives of people left behind by China's breakneck economic transformation.
Sixth Generation
Film historians love categories. They grouped China's post-revolution filmmakers into "generations." The Fifth Generation, which includes Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, emerged in the 1980s and became famous for visually stunning historical epics. Think of films like Hero or Raise the Red Lantern, with their saturated colors and mythological scope. These films found huge audiences abroad and helped define what Western viewers expected from Chinese cinema.
The Sixth Generation emerged in the 1990s as a deliberate rejection of everything the Fifth Generation represented. Where the older filmmakers dealt in legend and history, the younger ones shot contemporary stories in unglamorous locations. Where Fifth Generation films were visually lush, Sixth Generation work was gritty, often shot on digital video with natural lighting. Where the older generation received state support, the younger directors worked underground.
Jia Zhangke became the most prominent voice of this movement, though he worked alongside directors like Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye, and Zhang Yuan. What united them was a shared commitment to showing China as it actually was, not as the government or foreign audiences might prefer to see it.
The Shanxi Trilogy
Jia's first three features form an informal trilogy, all set in Shanxi province, his home region in north-central China. Xiao Wu came first, then Platform in 2000, then Unknown Pleasures in 2002.
Platform is often called the masterpiece of the entire Sixth Generation movement. It follows a provincial dance troupe over two decades, from the late Mao era through the economic reforms of the 1980s and into the 1990s. The film runs nearly three hours. Not much happens in the conventional sense. People rehearse. They talk. They travel on buses through the countryside. They fall in and out of love. They age.
But the film captures something extraordinary: the texture of lived experience during China's transformation from a communist planned economy to a market-driven society. You watch these performers shift from singing revolutionary anthems to performing Western pop songs for paying audiences. The change happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, exactly as it happened in real life.
Unknown Pleasures tackled something even more specific: the generation born under China's one-child policy. These young people, products of a massive social experiment, grew up as only children in a society transforming around them. Jia captured their aimlessness, their disconnection from the revolutionary fervor that had defined their parents' lives.
None of these three films received official release in mainland China. They existed as festival darlings and bootleg DVDs. Jia acknowledged this reality with a wry joke near the end of Unknown Pleasures: a character tries to buy a DVD of Xiao Wu, Jia's own film, from a street vendor selling pirated copies.
Coming Overground
In 2004, something changed. Jia received official approval to make The World, a film set in Beijing World Park, a theme park filled with miniature replicas of famous landmarks from around the globe. The Eiffel Tower stands near the Pyramids, which stand near the Taj Mahal. Visitors can "travel the world" without leaving Beijing.
For Jia, this gaudy theme park became a perfect metaphor for globalization and its discontents. The film follows workers at the park, young migrants from the countryside who dress in costumes and pose for tourist photos. They work amid fake versions of places they'll never actually visit. They perform globalization for others while remaining trapped in place themselves.
The transition from underground to official approval wasn't unique to Jia. Many Sixth Generation directors made similar moves around this time. Some critics worried that government approval would blunt Jia's critical edge. It didn't. The World was as clear-eyed about contemporary Chinese life as anything he'd made before. The government approved it anyway. Perhaps officials saw something different in the film than Western critics did, or perhaps they simply wanted to co-opt a director who had become impossible to ignore.
The Venice Triumph
Two years later, Jia won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Still Life. This is the highest honor Venice bestows, roughly equivalent to the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The film tells two parallel stories of people searching for their spouses in a town being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam.
The Three Gorges Dam is one of the largest engineering projects in human history. When completed, the reservoir it created displaced over a million people and submerged entire cities. Entire communities that had existed for centuries simply vanished beneath the rising waters.
Jia filmed in these communities as they were being demolished. His camera captured buildings half-torn-down, workers picking through rubble, residents salvaging what they could before the waters came. The destruction visible in the film is real. The dust, the debris, the sense of a world ending, all of it was happening as Jia shot.
Against this apocalyptic backdrop, Jia tells small human stories. A man searches for the wife he hasn't seen in sixteen years. A woman looks for her husband, who has stopped answering her calls. Their personal dramas unfold amid collective catastrophe.
The Long Take as Democracy
Watch any Jia Zhangke film and you'll notice something: the shots go on and on. Where most films cut constantly, jumping between angles and perspectives, Jia holds his camera steady and lets scenes unfold in real time. A character walks down a street. We watch the entire walk. Two people have a conversation. We see it all, uninterrupted.
This technique has a name: the long take. Jia inherited it from directors he admires, particularly the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Japanese giant Yasujirō Ozu. But Jia has theorized about why he uses it in specifically democratic terms.
When a director cuts constantly and zooms in on specific details, Jia argues, the director is telling the viewer exactly where to look and what to think. The viewer becomes passive, led by the nose through the story. But when the camera holds still on a wide shot, the viewer's eye can wander. You can look at the background or the foreground. You can notice small details that the director didn't emphasize. You're free to construct your own meaning.
This is what Jia means when he calls the long take "democratic." It respects the viewer's intelligence and autonomy. It trusts you to find what matters in the frame.
Italian Roots
Critics often compare Jia's work to Italian neorealism, a movement that emerged after World War Two. Directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica made films about ordinary people struggling through post-war poverty, shooting on real locations with nonprofessional actors. They rejected the artifice of studio filmmaking in favor of capturing life as it was actually lived.
The parallels to Jia's work are obvious. He too shoots on real locations, often in his home province. He too casts nonprofessional actors in many roles. He too focuses on working-class people navigating economic upheaval. The French filmmaker Robert Bresson, famous for his austere style and use of nonprofessional actors, was another major influence. Jia has spoken about how deeply Bresson's approach affected his own.
But Jia's films contain something the neorealists didn't have: pop music. His soundtracks overflow with Chinese pop songs, often playing from radios or televisions within the scene. Characters sing karaoke. They listen to cassette tapes. Popular culture saturates their lives, and Jia doesn't pretend otherwise. This gives his work a different texture than the Italian films, more playful and self-aware despite dealing with similarly weighty subjects.
Zhao Tao
In Platform, Jia cast a former dance teacher named Zhao Tao in a leading role. She had never acted professionally before. She would go on to appear in nearly every major film Jia made afterward: Unknown Pleasures, The World, Still Life, 24 City, and many others. She became not just his leading lady but his creative partner and, eventually, his wife.
The partnership recalls other famous director-muse collaborations: Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. But Zhao Tao brings something specific to Jia's films. Her background as a dancer gives her a physical grace and expressiveness that works beautifully with Jia's long takes. She can hold the screen without speaking, communicating through posture and movement in ways that dialogue-heavy acting cannot.
Building Institutions
As Jia's reputation grew, he turned some of his attention toward institution-building. In 2017, he founded the Pingyao International Film Festival in Shanxi province. Pingyao is an ancient walled city, one of the best-preserved examples of traditional Chinese urban architecture. Holding a film festival there was both a homecoming for Jia and a statement about bringing international cinema culture to the Chinese interior, away from the coastal megacities where such events typically occur.
He also took on academic roles, becoming dean of the Shanghai Vancouver Film School at Shanghai University in 2016 and later dean of the Shanxi Film Academy. These positions let him shape the next generation of Chinese filmmakers, passing along the ideas and techniques he'd developed over decades.
Speaking Out
Unlike many Chinese artists who avoid political controversy, Jia has occasionally spoken publicly about censorship and artistic freedom. In 2011, at a cultural forum in Shanghai, he criticized the Chinese film censorship system, calling it "cultural over-cleanliness." The phrase captures something important: the issue isn't just that authorities ban specific content, but that they create an atmosphere of excessive caution that makes artists censor themselves preemptively.
When authorities issued guidelines in 2021 limiting which actors could work based on their politics, morals, or aesthetics, Jia spoke out against the proposed regulations. Art creation, he argued, should be "eclectic." Coming from a filmmaker who had spent years navigating the official system, this was a notable statement.
In December 2023, Jia joined fifty other filmmakers in signing an open letter published in the French newspaper Libération calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid corridors, and the release of hostages. The letter was notable for including filmmakers from many countries and political backgrounds, united by concern about civilian casualties.
What China Looks Like
For Western audiences, Chinese cinema often means two things: either the historical epics of the Fifth Generation, with their martial arts and palace intrigue, or the blockbusters produced for the massive domestic market, which rarely make cultural impact abroad. Jia Zhangke offers something entirely different.
His films show China in the process of becoming. Construction sites and demolished neighborhoods. Migrant workers and small-town youth. People displaced by dams and development. The landscapes of rapid modernization, both physical and psychological. This is China as most Chinese people actually experience it, not the China of tourist brochures or government propaganda or Western stereotypes.
The films move slowly. They demand patience. They reward attention. And they capture something that faster, flashier cinema cannot: the texture of time passing, of lives being lived, of a society transforming at a pace faster than anyone can quite comprehend.
That young art student who wandered into a cinema in 1991 went on to create a body of work that will likely endure long after the buildings his camera captured have crumbled to dust. He found what he was looking for that day: not just a career, but a way of seeing.