XIAO JIA HUI JIA

Filmmaker Jia Zhangke's journey home after winning the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival for his film Still Life is profiled in this documentary by French director Damien Ounouri. Xiao Jia Going Home captures Jia's spirit through his thoughts and memories, exploring the streets of his childhood and the locations where his first two films were shot. Going beyond the boundaries of a simple personal profile, Ounouri's lens and Jia's stories take us on a guided tour of a side of China not often seen in the West, touching on the subjects of Chinese culture, social divides, censorship and the future.
«Though Jia Zhangke was born in 1970 in Fenyang, a small rural town in Shanxi province, his family was not of peasant origin; they were sent to the countryside because of his grandfather's experience as a surgeon in Europe. By looking at Jia's films, one perceives that his rural upbringing has had a profound effect on his aesthetic. Since the implementation of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the late Eighties, tremendous socio-economic changes have occurred in China, generated primarily from the urban centers along the coast, but gradually rippling into the rural, inland areas. The rural areas are not only geographically but governmentally, economically and even culturally distanced from the sources of change.» (Kevin Lee)

This film is screened together with He Shang De Ai Qing.