Jia Zhangke

Jia was born in 1970 in the small, remote town of Fenyang in North China's Shanxi Province. At the age of 18, Jia was a painting student at a fine arts school in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi. He also developed an interest in fiction, writing his first novel "The Sun Huang On The Crotch" in 1991. Two years later, he was admitted to the Literature Department of the Beijing Film Academy to start his study on film theory.

In 1995 he founded the Youth Experimental Film Group, the first independent film production organization in China. He directed two feature videos with the group --, "Xiao Shan Going Home", which won the Gold Prize at the Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Awards, and "Du Du."

Jia Zhangke's first feature was the 1997 acclaimed film "Xiao Wu" (Pickpocket), which he made the same year he graduated from the Beijing Film Academy.

Jia Zhangke's Filmography

1997: Pickpocket (Xiao Wu)

2000: Platform (Zhan Tai)

2002: Unknown Pleasures (Ren Xiaoyao)

2004: The World (Shijie)

The World

The World is set in an amusement park on the outskirts of an Asian megalopolis. Featuring traditional folk songs and an electronic score written by Taiwanese composer Lim Giong, The World follows the offbeat rhythm of the love story of Tao and Taisheng. Tao is a performing artist whose round-the-clock task is to amuse tourists with folk dances from other countries, and Taisheng, a security guard, live inside the gilded amusement park, where international architectural wonders such as the Arc de Triumph (Paris, France), Big Ben (London, England), and the Egyptian pyramids stand as scaled-down monuments to a simulated culture.

The two are naturally and necessarily brought together by their respective loneliness and by their struggle to find a purity of sentiment which, ultimately, they are destined to chase unsuccessfully. The microcosm of the theme park is a multi-layered symbol for the idea that the world exists wherever you are.

 Xiao Wu

The star protagonist of this film is a scummy-but-likeable petty criminal, a pickpocket preying on visitors to Fengyang, the provincial dirt-town he calls home. But times are hard and getting harder: his best friend is suddenly a "model entrepreneur" and doesn't want to know him any more; his family is falling apart; the leggy Mei-Mei from the local karaoke hostess bar seems to be stringing him along; and the cops are launching a crackdown on crime in the streets...

The film's turning-point is a scene in a public bath-house where Xiao Wu, alone, does what he has always refused to do in the karaoke bar: he sings his heart out. From this scene on, Xiao Wu's psyche is stripped away, layer after layer, until he is left as "naked" as a person can be.

Author:Ivana