A Chinese woman lives for herself in silence, celebrating the prosperous Belle Epoque with songs and dance.

	
Caught.by.the.Tides.2024.1080p.MUBI.WEB-DL.DD5.1.x264-Slope.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 51 min
Size: 	4.14 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1038 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 895 kb/s
BPP: 	0.102
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 320 kb/s (普通话)

https://nitro.download/view/9F6827FB85A84A8/Caught.by.the.Tides.2024.1080p.MUBI.WEB-DL.DD5.1.x264-Slope.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English, Italian

The post Zhangke Jia – Feng liu yi dai AKA Caught by the Tides (2024) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Set in China’s underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows Qiao, a dancer who fires a few warning shots during a fight and then, after lying to protect her gangster lover Bin from a long prison sentence, ends up in jail herself. When she’s released five years later into a changed world, she goes in search of Bin, who has been mysteriously silent during her imprisonment…

Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune wrote:
The exquisite Ash Is Purest White owes some of its richness to the movies, particularly crime and gangster movies in various languages.The rest of it comes from the poetic eye of writer-director Jia Zhangke, who shows us what he feels about the real world as represented by contemporary China — its telling details, creased faces and panoramic visions of progress bulldozing its way into the future, at a great many people’s expense. This is one of Zhangke’s peak achievements: pure cinema, and a story of the underworld unlike anything you’ve seen before…Some films present a feast for the eye with great flourish and extravagance. This one is a different kind of feast. If there’s a director alive whose compositions breathe more easily and move a story forward with a more stimulating variety of visual strategies, let me know.

Ash.Is.Purest.White.2018.720p.BluRay.x264-PbK.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 15 min
Size: 	6.25 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x694 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	6 130 kb/s
BPP: 	0.288
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s (Mandarin)

https://nitro.download/view/943DC55113F387C/Ash.Is.Purest.White.2018.720p.BluRay.x264-PbK.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/CDBAC7AD0281A27/Ash.Is.Purest.White.PbK.English_corrected.srt

Language:Mandarin
Subtitles: English; Simplified Chinese (PGS/sup); Traditional Chinese (PGS/sup); Indonesian (srt); Brazilian Portuguese (srt).

The post Zhangke Jia – Jiang hu er nv AKA Ash Is Purest White (2018) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
An angry miner revolts against the corruption of his village leaders. A migrant worker at home for the New Year discovers the infinite possibilities a firearm can offer. A pretty receptionist at a sauna is pushed to the limit when a rich client assaults her. A young factory worker goes from job to job trying to improve his lot in life. Four people, four different provinces.

Jia’s world has its own geography. It (re)organized China into a personal map, where almost everything starts and ends in the filmmaker’s native province of Shanxi. It is the starting point and the ultimate “home.” This is where Xiao Wu the pickpocket operated, where the itinerant performers of Zhantai (Platform, 2000) roamed, where the sad heroes of Ren xiao yao (Unknown Pleasures, 2002) burnt their lives out, where the migrant worker of San Xia hao ren (Still Life 2006) and Shijie (The World, 2004) came from. This is where Tian zhu ding starts and finishes at the end of a tragic “tour.” The cities of Fenyang or Datong, the countryside and the murderous privatized coal mines have long been a compass to Jia’s filmic China.

Here Shanxi has two “alter ego” characters. One is called “Sanming,” and the other is played by Wang Hongwei. Wang Hongwei was Xiao Wu, and Xiao Wu has a filmic biography that made him a small town crook again in Ren xiao yao. In Tian zhu ding, Wang/Wu dies under the blade of the film’s lady knight, played by Zhao Tao. He did not make a big fortune, his money came from local corruption. The banknotes he slaps Zhao Tao’s Xiaoyu with are somehow archaic: archaic money compared with the very modern money of the clients of the night club “Golden Age.” We see the class differences among crooks and bullies.

The other character mirroring Shanxi and Wang’s Xiao Wu is “Sanming,” the miner, the worker. Not a “favorite actor” and maybe hardly a regular “film character;” more a person and a figure of destiny. Sanming’s status never changes. Time has passed, from his place in Platform as the “about to work at the mine” cousin of Wang Hongwei’s character, to his story as a Shanxi miner looking for his fiancée in Still Life. “Sanming” has not changed: In Tian zhu ding, he is the first person Dahai meets when entering the mine canteen, and the one who sees him off when he goes “hunting.” He is on the boat to Chongqing-Fengjie where we meet again the assassin San’er (actor Wang Baoqiang, who started with Blind Shaft, a film about miners, before becoming a huge TV star). An almost voiceless worker, whose low-key design is the representation of a “prolonged sorrow,” “Sanming” is a figure of the people, the “lao bai xing (“old hundred surnames,” old being here the adjective for a warm touch), workers or peasants, younger or older. Yet Jia’s vision is neither a nostalgic nor a merely compassionate one: it is subtly lyrical. “Sanming” is the hero of a ballad than is sung from film to film, whose virtues are told in an undertone, far from the glossy vulgarity of official images and globalized show-business. In Tian zhu ding, “Sanming” has a younger avatar: Xiao Hui lives the fate of the new age of Chinese industrial boom. Textile and computer factories, huge dormitories, quickly built cities and malls are the coal mines of a globalized economy.

Jia’s geography has its bitterly ironical El Dorado. It is a place that is never seen, but mentioned and referred to in all his films: Mongolia, the province north of Shanxi. “It snows over Mongolia and Shanxi” says the weather forecast Lianrong reads to Xiao Hui at the Golden Age. Mongolia as a mysterious promise of another life, the goal of a journey that will never be made, a dream place, even if a real one. An utopia never to be realized, a new home never to be found, or a “next world” for hungry ghosts. In Tian zhu ding, the Mongolia of San’er’s bandit is Burma, a place where guns are cheap. To each his El Dorado. On Jia’s map, the “capital city” is never seen. It has a name, though: “Zhongnanhai in Peking.” This is where Dahai wants to send his petition. Zhongnanhai is the domain which serves as central headquarters to the government and the Communist Party Central Committee. Some call it “the other forbidden city.” In Tian zhu ding, it is enough for Dahai to write the name. But the post office girl insists that “the address is incomplete.” Another Mongolia, another illusion.

Jia’s geography has a central region: the provinces of Sichuan and the neighbor province of Hubei. This is where Tian zhu ding’s Sanming is going to spend the New Year’s holiday. More specifically, in the city of Fengjie that was wiped out of the map by the Three Gorges Dam (Still Life). San’er is headed to his home village halfway between Wuhan and Chongqing, while Zhao Tao/Xiaoyu’s home city is Yichang. Thus, the triangle where the Three Gorges Dam is. The filmic “central region” is the huge controversial symbol of a country’s official politics of “modernization.” An emblem, a key reality to tell the wiping out of the past, the uprooting of millions. Destruction disguised as construction: a leitmotiv.

Going South means heading toward the “modern world”: a globalized universe where hopes and necessities are confronted with the updated forms of oppression, as dreams are challenged by the glossy illusions of globalized high life. In the South are the “special economic zones” in the province of Canton: the megalopolis of the Pearl River delta (one of the first to open to foreign investments) and Dongguan, where young worker Xiao Hui meets Lianrong, before injustice catches up with him and throws him into despair. In Jia’s geography, the South is the place where linguistics complete the mapping. With extreme attention and precision, he makes every character (professional actor or not) speak the “right” language: whether through dialect or the use of accents. Language is the constant reminder that someone is “from somewhere,” geographically and socially. In the never ending travels of the migrants, dialect is the fragile link with “home”, the basis for some solidarity, the last trace of a personal identity. The presence of national standard Chinese (continental putonghua and Taiwanese guoyu) is clearly here an occasion for a critical variation on “newspeaks”: the communist vocabulary is a farce in the “leader’s train wagon” sex play, television shouts the bombastic formulas of “harmonious” society, the welcoming sentences imposed by the night club manager are the archaic formulas of old times servility, and the businessmen’s language is an anthology of readymade managerial slogans. There is a crisis in language. Dialects and accents are a territory where language is neither “communication” nor coercion but a fragile means of free expression and resistance. […] (Marie-Pierre Duhamel)

Tian.Zhu.Ding.2013.REPACK.VOSTFR.BDRip.x264.AC3-KINeMA.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 9mn
Size:	2.56 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1024x426
Aspect ratio:	2.40:1
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 318 Kbps
Audio
English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/98F215175082CB4/Tian.Zhu.Ding.2013.REPACK.VOSTFR.BDRip.x264.AC3-KINeMA.mkv

Language:Chinese
Subtitles:English, French

The post Zhangke Jia – Tian zhu ding AKA A Touch of Sin (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.

Award-winning Sixth Generation director Jia Zhangke’s 2007 documentary Useless weaves a three-part tale about the Chinese clothing industry. The documentary opens in the textile factories of Guangdong, where workers hunch over massive machines day in day out for low pay, before moving to Paris where fashion designer Ma Ke is unveiling her new collection of organic, avant-garde, haute couture designs. Running counter to the clothing industry’s culture of mass production and reproduction, her new line “Wu Yong”, meaning “Useless”, lends the film its title, and forms the heart of the documentary. The third act of the film travels to a tailor shop in a dusty mining town in Shanxi. Using a down-to-earth montage of people and places, Useless brings out the significance of clothing, and the different faces and sectors of modern China.

	
Wuyong.AKA.Useless.2007.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 24 min
Size: 	1.02 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	716x480 ~> 853x480
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 510 kb/s
BPP: 	0.183
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/CCB2006A1CF8A4B/Wuyong.AKA.Useless.2007.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English, Korean

The post Zhangke Jia – Wuyong AKA Useless (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT: Jia Zhangke travels with painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China’s Three Gorges Dam project. Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being “de-constructed” by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu’s paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects’ shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.

Dong.2006.480p.DVDRip.AC3.x264-CrsS.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 10 min
Size: 	1.16 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x466 ~> 862x466
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 112 kb/s
BPP: 	0.263
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/C91F46B966C0F39/Dong.2006.480p.DVDRip.AC3.x264-CrsS.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Thai
Subtitles:English, Chinese

The post Zhangke Jia – Dong (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

2.89GB | 1h 47m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/92F218D2E777209/Sanxia.haoren.AKA.Still.Life.2006.576p.BluRay.x264.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English,Portuguese

The post Zhangke Jia – Sanxia haoren AKA Still Life (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Filmmaker Jia Zhangke chronicles his local literature festival in Shanxi, China which includes a multi-generational roster of the country’s most esteemed writers.

3.69GB | 1h 52m | 1920×1036 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0ACCCF72BC4B568/Yi_zhi_you_dao_hai_shui_bian_lan.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English hardcoded

The post Zhangke Jia – Yi zhi you dao hai shui bian lan AKA Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020) first appeared on Cinema of the World.