24 City

A Chinese film about the demolition of a factory. In Chengdu there is Factory 420. It was founded in 1958 to make aircraft engines, employed thousands, and built a town around itself with its own neighbourhood, school and hospital. Now it has been sold. The land has passed to property developers and a luxury housing complex will be built in its place; the complex is called 24 City. The film talks to eight people. Each of them describes a period connected to the factory. What is told spreads over three generations. The workers brought from Shanghai at the founding, those who joined in the 1980s, and the children of the factory. A woman tells of the child she lost. A foreman tells of being laid off. A young woman works in a shopping centre and has never set foot inside the factory. What the narrative is interested in is not industry but transfer: the film asks about the move from one mode of production to another and who lost what in it. Its most argued-over aspect is its form. Five of the eight interviews were done with real workers and four with professional actors, and the actors deliver invented characters as if they were real. The film does not signal this. The audience listens without knowing which is which, and the director does that deliberately. Between them there are images of the factory. Empty halls, machines being dismantled, a ceremony and a last shift. Joan Chen, Lü Liping, Zhao Tao and Chen Jianbin are in the cast. Jia Zhangke directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone curious about the border between documentary and fiction and anyone who likes contemporary Chinese cinema. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative; the film is almost entirely people talking and the pace is very slow.