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Xiao Wu
Jia Zhangke
Part of
Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux
June 11 - August 26, 2021
Among the most essential filmmakers of the past several decades, Jia Zhangke launched his career with this, his 1997 debut about a pickpocket struggling to keep up with the current of China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.
DIRECTOR
Jia Zhangke
YEAR
1997
COUNTRY
China
RUNTIME
112 minutes
LANGUAGE
Mandarin with English subtitles
START DATE
July 23, 2021
Now playing through August 12!
Among the most essential filmmakers of the past several decades, Jia Zhangke launched his career with this, his 1997 debut (featured in New Directors/New Films in 1999) about a pickpocket struggling to keep up with the current of China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse. Abandoned by his friends and associates and stymied by the terrain shifting beneath him, the titular and somewhat nihilistic thief stumbles upon a chance at love—or at least a human connection—and finds himself confronted with the question: is this any way to live? Even in this early work, Jia’s unsurpassed attentiveness to the texture of quotidian life amid a society in flux is powerfully in evidence, presaging his current status as cinema’s great portraitist of the latter-day Chinese behemoth. A Janus Films release. An NYFF58 Revivals selection. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with Jia Zhangke and in association with MK2. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
An auspicious beginning to one of the most impressive careers in 21st century cinema.
—J. Hoberman, The New York Times
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