He was born in 1970 in Fenyang, a small town in Shanxi province, northern China. His parents, both civil servants, instilled in him a love of the classics, and, as he himself says, despite difficult living conditions, they made every effort to maintain a literary and artistic life. His father was undoubtedly the source of his passion for directing, as he was the director of the school's drama club. But although attached to his family, like all young people his age, Jia dreamed of the big city... He went to Taiyuan to study fine arts, but discovering Chen Kaige's film Yellow Earth (1984) profoundly affected him, leading him to change his field of study and dedicate himself to cinema. He was admitted to the Beijing Film Institute in 1993, graduating four years later with a degree in directing. Just a few months later, from the crumpled papers covering his desk emerged the script for Xiao Wu, the Pickpocket (1997), his first feature film. The film, which won numerous awards at various international festivals, was a true sensation on the world cinema scene and revealed a great filmmaker.

The film's protagonist is Xiao Wu, a small-time crook in the old style, still respectful of certain codes of the trade. His story, which takes place in the director's hometown, is a series of highly instructive episodes about the state of contemporary China, particularly about how economic reform and the pursuit of money are transforming human relationships.

From his very first feature film, made independently of official structures, Jia Zhang-ke became the eloquent spokesperson for a new aesthetic that successfully transcended the boundaries between documentary and fiction, placing those left behind by China's frenetic modernization in the 1990s at the center of attention. His bewilderment and empathy for those least able to adapt to the changes in modern society became the hallmark of a new generation of filmmakers, of which Jia is undoubtedly the leader.

His next film, Platform (2000), was also an independent production, made possible, among other things, by the support of Office Kitano. The film recounts the social upheaval experienced in China between 1979 and 1989 through the journey of a troupe of provincial artists. No one before had told the story of China in the 1980s, a period rich in events and transformations: the end of mass ideology, the introduction of Western pop culture, the emergence of a capitalist society. These were the director's teenage years; this is why Platform, although it cannot be called an autobiographical film, remains his most personal work to date. Like Xiao Wu, the film was also a great success, and for Jia, it was a crowning achievement.

In 2002, Jia Zhang-ke directed Unknown Pleasures, his third feature film. The protagonists are two teenagers who kill time smoking cigarettes, hanging out in pool halls, and wandering the streets of their small town. After exploring the distant children of the Cultural Revolution in Platform, Jia Zhang-ke here addresses the generation of the only child, born in the mid-1980s. His direction, both simple and powerful, masterfully highlights the unease of these lonely and disoriented young people, condemned to a meaningless existence in their small towns where the economic miracle has yet to materialize. Fenyang, in fact, receives only the muffled echo of the frenetic development of cities like Beijing and Shanghai, so that thousands of teenagers, like the two protagonists, dream without much hope of pleasures that will remain unknown. Unknown Pleasures concludes the trilogy that Jia Zhangke dedicated to the evolution of Chinese youth in the last decades of the 20th millennium. The young people he films, despite the years that separate them, share a common thread: they are utterly bewildered by the world around them. From the protagonist of Xiao Wu, who helplessly witnesses the collapse of his social circle's codes, to the characters in Platform, caught between hope and disillusionment, and finally to the protagonists of Unknown Pleasures, who experience the disintegration of the collective without any ideology providing them with the keys to unlock the new world of individual experience.

In one of his many essays, Jia Zhangke defines this trilogy as the result of his "dissatisfaction with reality," and cinema as the tool that can help him reflect on a change as desired as it is necessary: ​​the young Jia has found his mission, and the marginalized have found their fervent advocate.

In this creative process, the director can now count on a new ally: the DV camera. It offers him the necessary freedom of movement, even though Jia aspires to an even greater freedom: that of being able to bring his films out of the margins and show them to the Chinese public. His struggle culminates in 2003 with a very important victory: the Chinese authorities extend a hand to independent filmmakers by announcing a simplification of censorship rules. This will finally allow them to obtain permission to shoot and distribute films legally in China. In this creative process, the director can now count on a new ally: the DV camera. It offers him the necessary freedom of movement, even though Jia aspires to an even greater freedom: that of being able to bring his films out of the margins and show them to the Chinese public. His struggle culminates in 2003 with a very important victory: the Chinese authorities extend a hand to independent filmmakers by announcing a simplification of censorship rules. This will finally allow them to obtain permission to shoot and distribute films legally in China. Jia Zhang-ke enthusiastically embraced the initiative, hoping to revitalize a national film industry now operating at a two-tiered pace. His two subsequent films, The World (2004) and Still Life (2006), were thus produced and distributed legally. The World revisits the director's recurring themes of loneliness and social marginalization, but the setting has shifted. It is no longer a small provincial town. This time, it is quite simply... the world! In a theme park where the planet's most beautiful tourist sites are recreated in miniature, the entertainers who work there navigate their lives between fleeting hopes and profound disappointments.

A powerful metaphor for China's response to globalization, The World is a mirror image of human anxieties (both Chinese and Western). With Still Life, complemented by its documentary counterpart Dong (2006), Jia returns to his roots: he abandons the miniature world capitals to return to the remote provinces of China. The idea for the documentary preceded the fiction film. Jia follows a painter friend, Liu Xiaodong, to the Three Gorges Dam area to film him creating a series of paintings of the workers demolishing the buildings and towns of the region about to be submerged. Once there, Jia is captivated by the place and the fate of its inhabitants. The documentary then becomes a kind of historical record of the area, and Jia decides to expand upon it with a fictional narrative. Like the director, the two protagonists of Still Life return to their roots, deciding to go back to their homeland in search of their loved ones. Parachuted into the 2006 Venice Film Festival at the very last minute and thus presented to a press screening in a nearly empty theater, Still Life won over the jury, who unanimously awarded it the Golden Lion. To those who worried about the filmmaker being co-opted by the system, the film provided an unequivocal answer: Jia Zhang-ke's talent had not been sacrificed on the altar of officialdom. On the contrary, he is an auteur who has lost none of his striking style. Filming the rapid social, economic, and cultural changes in contemporary China as one world gives way to another becomes the leitmotif that Jia refines in his successive films through a blend of genres because, as a connoisseur of cinema, he knows very well that filmmaking needs to reinvent itself to survive. Thus, in Useless (2007), he adopts an experimental approach, blending the dimensions of social documentary and aesthetic reflection to raise crucial questions about the globalized economy and the materiality of consumer culture. In contrast, docufiction takes center stage in 24 City (2008) and I Wish I Knew (2010). In the former, Jia explores the closure of a state-owned factory in Chengdu through the personal accounts of the last remaining workers; in the latter, Chengdu gives way to another historic city, Shanghai, where filmmakers, writers, and workers evoke their past and paint a poignant portrait of the city's history since the 1930s. Jia Zhangke's virtuoso camera follows the journeys, both geographical and temporal, of actress Zhao Tao through the memories of Shanghainese people. The new millennium has seen an increasingly globalized world, rife with unpredictable outbreaks of violence, and this could not escape Jia Zhangke's watchful eye, as he stigmatizes it in his novel A Touch of Sin (2013) through the interweaving of four distinct stories. In various locations across China, the protagonists cease to submit to an order that seems increasingly unjust. Violence then becomes a form of expression. With a more dynamic style and a darker tone, Jia delivers a profoundly pessimistic vision of contemporary China, marked by alienation and the loss of traditional values. From Mountains May Depart (2015) to his latest, Wildfire (2024), by way of Ash Is Purest White (2018), Jia Zhangke initiates a reflection on the evolution of China over several decades, questioning in particular the fate of the essential values ​​that underpin human relationships in a context of growing materialism. Spanning three time periods (2001, 2006, and 2022), Wild Fires offers a triple journey: into the changing China of the last 25 years, into the lives of those who lived through it, and also into the very cinema of Jia Zhangke; a journey that thus takes on almost the air of a retrospective of his work, where the more radical fictions of his early period mingle with his documentaries and a current, more romantic vein. And as a common thread running through the three films, we find the splendid Zhao Tao, Jia Zhangke's muse, who has traversed all eras with melancholy and resilience, the same qualities that characterize the entire Chinese people to whom Jia's films are dedicated. The icing on the cake of this remarkable tribute that the Vesoul Film Festival is paying to this great director in his presence is the screening of two previously unseen gems: Swimming Out Til the Sea Turns Blue (2020), a documentary that explores collective and individual memory through the voices of three Chinese writers born between 1950 and 1970; and Black Dog (2024) by Hu Gang, which will allow us to discover our director in the unusual role of actor. In conclusion, Jia Zhangke's cinema stands as a precious testament to the complex realities of 21st-century China. This retrospective allows for a comprehensive understanding of his work, which continues to recount, from an ever-original and relevant perspective, the unprecedented transformations of post-socialist China.

Luisa Prudentino, Specialist in Chinese Cinema