words dawn ho

One of China’s leading directors straddles genres to capture history.
Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke’s latest film, 24 City, is an experimental fiction-documentary hybrid that takes place in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. Centring on the demolition and transformation into a luxury-housing complex of a vast munitions plant, it tells the stories of workers who had built their lives around Factory 420. Jia moulds his work around five authentic interviews and four fictional scenes delivered by professional actors. Director Jia talked to bc about merging genres, poetry and why fiction is not always fantasy.

First of all, how did you develop the idea of this movie?
The reason I wanted to make this movie arose quite by chance. I came across a newspaper article about a 50-year-old factory that was going to be torn down. The plant supported about 100,000 people, 30,000 of whom were its workers. From this, I saw that the scope of this demolition project reached far beyond the physical building itself: The unspoken stories and memories of several generations of workers and their families were about to be forgotten. Since this phenomenon of demolitions and layoffs was quite typical during the wave of reforms that transformed China from a planned into a market economy, I felt a movie needed to be made about this change in workers’ lives, perhaps even as a portrait of this stage of China’s development.

The film deals with some of the negative repercussions of China’s economic reform, it is potentially quite a sensitive subject. Did you run into any trouble with the authorities?
Even though the effect on the workers’ lives throughout the country was very significant during the reform process, [that effect] was not uncommon at all. In fact, the film’s sentiments were probably shared throughout the whole nation. From this perspective, my film was not introducing anything particularly inflammatory and condemning. There was really no way of barring this film from being made. During the final inspection process, it took about three months before we received permission to distribute the film.

Throughout the movie, you blend fiction with documentary. Why did you choose to do that?
I didn’t actually plan this from the start. What I originally intended was to rely purely on first-hand narrations. However, when I started the process of filming, I realized that I had to include some fictional elements to achieve my objective, because it was not possible to include so many stories in one film. I interviewed 100 workers throughout the course of a year and only through the fictional stories could I condense all those shared experiences into a coherent form. You see, fiction is not necessarily a lie.

Besides from merging fact with fiction, you included segments of poetry in between the interviews. What inspired you to do that?
Well, my film is based on people’s narration and their words. There are a lot of monologues within the film as well as captured sequences of the characters simply in silence. Amongst the mixed images and clips of these people, I felt that only poetrywas able to capture and distill the sentiments they were feeling. Nowadays, most mainstream films rely heavily on fast-paced action to convey their plots. However, I feel people’s complex feelings can be much better expressed through language. So I wanted to make a film that returned to words. To achieve this, I collaborated with a famous Chinese poet, Zhai Yongming, to select poems: We picked a few from poets such as Ouyang Jianghe and W B Yeats. Through this exercise, I felt I was able to break away from the restrictions of one genre and combine all these different features.

24 City has screened at several film festivals. How was it received?
Initially I was rather worried about a non-Chinese-speaking audience. Since my film relies heavily on speech, words and language, instead of action, I felt that merely relying on subtitles might hinder the audience’s understanding of the film. On the contrary, the film was rather well received and language did not seem to be a problem. Besides language barriers, I was also worried that this transition the workers were experiencing may be uniquely Chinese. I thought that it might not be very relatable to an international audience. However, I was proven wrong yet again. Their plight and the state of confusion and helplessness the workers experienced with the government was a very universal experience. For example, one time I travelled to Japan to give a news conference about the film. It just so happened that a few large local firms had announced massive lay-offs just the day before. When I held my conference the next day, a lot of press from the financial sector showed up to cover the story. I realized that these kinds of challenges and difficulties are quite universal, and I felt quite happy about capturing this very sentiment in my film.

24 City opens on July 2 in IFC and Cinematheque.