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Ghost Town
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… [an] observational documentary, “Ghost Town,” takes place in a world so removed from the pastoral it might as well be set on another planet and, in some respects, it is….directed with scrupulous attention to detail by Zhao Dayong. The China here, represented by the hard lives of different village folk… offers a grim contrast to the country racing toward the future.” -Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“Ghost Town is one of the most surprising and rewarding films I’ve seen all year, one of the most important films to have emerged from the booming (but still underexplored) field of Chinese independent documentaries.” - Dennis Lim, New York Film Festival selection committee member
Ghost Town
Zhao Dayong, 2008, China, 169m
With this absorbing three-part epic documentary, Zhao Dayong joins the ranks of the essential Chinese independent filmmakers, led by Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing. Zhiziluo is a remote village in China’s mountainous southwest, lined with empty shells of buildings and watched over by a Chairman Mao statue. In this dilapidated ghost town, the young filmmaker Zhao documents remarkable signs of life: father and son pastors, parsing the Bible and the teachings of long-departed missionaries; lovers whose relationships are reduced to a matter of economics; a 12-year-old boy, left behind by his parents and living a near-feral existence. Throughout, Zhao composes brilliant, haunting images that use the harsh beauty of the landscape as a counterpoint to a study of different forms of abandonment, and different modes of survival.
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