STILL LIFE DEPICTS LIFE INNUNDATING IN CHINA
The aim of Still Life (Sanxia haoren), directed by Jia Zhang-Ke, is to demonstrate the impact of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China upon those whose homes were inundated along the upper Yangtze. Two phases of the project have been completed, and workers are demolishing the buildings of a town that will be flooded in phase three. Han Sanming (playing a character of the same name), a coal miner, comes from distant Shanxi province to see his daughter and wife, whom he abandoned sixteen years earlier to earn decent wages. His search reveals much about the way in which the people in the town are being mortified by their funereal tasks in what will soon become an underwater ghost town. As is often the case with Chinese films, the expressions on faces and the choice of words communicate a sense of fatalism and nostalgia that all experience as China modernizes relentlessly. The humble emotions of the past are being replaced by the crass materialism of the present. Indeed, the final scene depicts an inevitable victory of the survivalist needs of alienated men who have lost spiritual meaning in their lives. Clearly, the film is an indictment of the cruelty of displacing millions to feed energy needs of millions. Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Still Life for best film exposé of 2008. MH