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
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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.

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.

Shijie (2004)

Quote:
 Jia Zhang Ke’s The World continues along the same path as Platform and Unknown Pleasures, but it’s livelier. This gorgeous, profoundly melancholy distillation of contemporary China’s precarious global position is his most accessible film to date. From the stunning opening tracking shot, in which Tao (Zhao Tao) glides through the backstage of the eponymous amusement park, loudly asking for a Band-Aid, Jia cannily conflates the magical and the prosaic. The World may end with a whimper, but it certainly starts with a bang. That opening immediately establishes a strong sense of community, but by the end of the film, we learn that among the working class in contemporary Beijing, the bonds of friendship and romance are ephemeral by necessity. People arrive because they have to, like the desperate men who follow Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) from the country looking for work, and leave when they can. As Tao makes clear, noting of a passing plane that she’s never met anyone who’s flown anywhere, even with a chintzy miniature replica of the globe at their disposal, the prospects of ever really going anywhere are slim. Tao and her co-workers take solace in colorful (if monotonous) performances, and in the strange but undeniable beauty of the park itself. Fantasies of flight and adventure are reserved for the animated sequences that Jia uses to highlight the frequent text messages his characters send each other, as though through this fleeting interconnectedness with each other — and through a technology that binds them to the “real” world they never see — these people find a space to dream. Jia ends his beautifully shot, heartbreaking film on an odd note, which does nothing to dissipate the film’s haunting spell.

Quote:
There is something about a one-ring circus or a run-down theme park that appeals to me. There is a poignancy in the shabbiness of their glory. Once on the Lido in Venice, out of season, I was one of nine people in the audience as an old lady in spangles rode around the ring on a discouraged pony. I ate sugar-coated peanuts and wept inside, perhaps from joy.

“The World” takes place almost entirely within a theme park in Beijing. “America has lost her Twin Towers,” a guide observes, “but we still have ours.” Yes, and the Eiffel Tower, Piazza San Marco, St. Peter’s Square, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Big Ben. All of these landmarks are about the height of the McDonald’s arches; one is reminded of the miniature Stonehenge, descending from above in “This is Spinal Tap.”

How do you visit these miniature tourist attractions? There is an exhausted two-car monorail that creeps along its elevated track. Or you can board a jet airplane that never leaves the ground, which lends a certain jollity to the instructions about how to use your seat belt and the oxygen masks.

An American documentarian like Errol Morris would visit this world and find easy humor in its stunted grandiosity. But “The World” has been made in China by Jia Zhangke, a director who has been in much trouble with the authorities — not because he embraces the West, but because he mocks modern China for trying to become Western in such haste. He doesn’t yearn for the days of Chairman Mao, but he doesn’t find the emerging China much of an improvement; the nation seems trapped between two sterilities.

His plot keeps most of the tourists at a distance. He is concerned with the people who work in this park, changing their costumes in order to become now an Italian dancer, now a camel driver. They live in shabby rooms hidden away behind the gaudy attractions, and dream of someday visiting the countries whose citizens they impersonate. The dressmaker Qun (Huang Yiqun) is married to a husband she has not seen for years; he was part of a boatload of illegal immigrants to Europe, one of only six to survive. Now he is in Paris and she hopes for a passport. But passports seem to lead to The World, not away.

Two Russian dancers arrive, and their passports are confiscated by a man who assures them “they will be safer with me.” Later we see Anna (Alla Chtcherbakova) in a club, where she appears to have become a prostitute, probably against her will. Meanwhile, Qun has a sort of an affair with Taisheng (Chen Taisheng), a security guard. Is she cheating on her husband in Paris, or does he even remember her? Both Taisheng and the dancer Tao (Zhao Tao) come from the same small town, and remember it with nostalgia mixed with hopelessness; if The World offers them dubious futures, their childhoods seemed to offer none.

There is a sense that someone is getting rich somewhere in China, but not the owners and operators of The World. There is an irony that foreign tourists are visiting a theme park where poor Chinese wander dubiously among miniatures of a world they will never be able to visit. On New Year’s Eve, the park originates a telecast that will be seen “by one billion viewers worldwide.” The same mythical billion who also don’t really watch the Oscars.

The movie is long and slow. Either you will fall into its rhythm, or you will grow restless. At first I felt like someone who had spent a humid afternoon at The World and wanted to know, “Can I go home now?” Then I became invested in the backstage story, which emerges slowly and in uncertain pieces. There is integrity in a movie that refuses to pump up melodrama where none belongs. This is not a movie about an amusement park threatened by a bomb, or populated by colorful characters, or made into the object of satire. It is a movie about people doing boring and badly paid work day after day while being required to look happy.

In China, the grandparents of these characters no doubt worked in rice fields or garment sweatshops, or as street vendors. Now the young generation wears uniforms and costumes and occupies a replica of the modern world. Jia Zhangke seems to think they are even unhappier than their ancestors; is hard labor better than pointless labor? Consider the romance between Qun and Taisheng. Where will it lead? What plans can they make? And is China unique in offering this kind of employment as a dead end? Ask a clerk at Wal-Mart.

After the screening, I rode down on the elevator with the great film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. “I’ve seen it five times,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite films. I still don’t understand the ending.” I was not only afraid to ask him what he didn’t understand about the ending, I was afraid to ask him what he thought the ending was. In a sense, “The World” is about a story that never really begins.

2.19GB | 2h 19m | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/35314AE52A206D4/Zhang_Ke_Jia_-_(2004)_The_World.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Russian, English
Subtitles:English

The post Zhangke Jia – Shijie AKA The World (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The life of Tao, and those close to her, is explored in three different time periods: 1999, 2014, and 2025.

Quote:
Following the brilliant A Touch of Sin, auteur and Chinese master Jia Zhangke returns with a similarly structured, yet more narratively linked, portrait of China in the new millennium. Mountains May Depart is two-thirds of a gripping relationship drama that captures not only a China in constant flux, but also the universality of human experience. Unfortunately, in the last act the threads of the narrative begin to fray and fall apart, to the point where the strong final sequence is left weaker by the undercooked scenes that precede it.

Taking place over three distinct time periods, the film begins in the year 1999 at the dawn of the new millennium. Young friends Tao (Tao Zhao), Zhang (Yi Zhang) and Liangzi (Jing Dong Liang), like the rest of China, are happy and hopeful with what the new century may bring. The problem is that both Zhang and Liangzi are in love with Tao, which drives a wedge between the two men, especially when Tao falls in love with the wealthier Zhang, ending the triumvirate once and for all. Fifteen years later and Tao and Zhang are divorced and Tao has lost custody of their only son and she now struggles to connect with him or provide him with the requisite motherly attention. Another eleven years on, it is the year 2025 and a now the son, Dollar, is a teenager (Zijian Dong) who lives with Zhang in an idyllic Australian city. Here he is estranged from his father and the landscape, struggling to find a surrogate mother to replace the one he felt he never had.

Mountains May Depart is at its strongest in the early scenes as Jia Zhangke sets up and explores the love triangle between Tao, Zhang and Liangzi. Their relationship is nothing new in fiction, but Jia has a way of taking this tried and true set up and making something achingly beautiful from it. He understands the universality of a story like this and is able to just let his characters go through it. This provides a little dramatic irony too, as we know how a story like this is going to go, but Jia is still able to twist the story enough to make it a little unpredictable. Tao’s relationship with her estranged son is unexpectedly sad, as her detachment from him proves damaging to his psyche.

These relationships are made all the more powerful by the performances of the central cast, particularly Tao Zhao who more or less has to carry the entire film until the final act. She is able to convey a sea of emotions with just a slight facial expression and when she smiles we can see every single thought in her mind projected outward. Jing Dong Liang is also wonderful as Liangzi, the man who was the third wheel in Tao and Zhang’s budding romance. He gets his own story of struggling with illness brought on by his work in the mines that is heart-breaking, and Jing brings equal parts pride and sadness to the role that makes Liangzi such an emotional character to watch.

Sadly, all of this emotional power all but dissipates when the action shifts from China to a futuristic Australia. Tao’s son Dollar finds himself lost in a foreign country, unsure of his identity and wanting to fill the void inside him left by his absent mother. He does this by falling in love with his English language teacher, Mia (Sylvia Chang), who is many years his senior. Like the character of Dollar himself, this section of the film flounders as it tries to find its place in the narrative. Apart from a slight thematic link, it feels like it comes from a different film all together and isn’t helped by Zijian Dong’s wooden performance. He doesn’t appear all that comfortable in the role and the film suffers for it.

It is a real shame that Mountain May Depart cannot sustain itself. Two-thirds of the film is quite remarkable with some terrific performances. Yet the final act is so mediocre it lessens the entire experience. Applause to Jia Zhangke for experimenting and trying something different but it just doesn’t work. After his monumentally excellent A Touch of Sin last year this film feels like a misstep, or perhaps a side-step in the wrong direction. Hopefully, his next film will still be as ambitious, but just with a clearer objective and more coherent connective tissue.

Zhangke Jia - (2015) Mountains May Depart.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 6 min
Size: 	2.25 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 164 kb/s
BPP: 	0.160
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 384 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/58E78432E398932/Zhangke_Jia_-_(2015)_Mountains_May_Depart.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English

The post Zhangke Jia – Shan he gu ren AKA Mountains May Depart (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.