24 City

What gets closer to the truth: documentary or fiction? 24 City tells a number of stories about the deep-rooted social revolution going on in China today. It is set in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, at a luxury apartment complex called 24 City being built on the site of Factory 420, a former airplane engine plant. Jia captures the last days of the factory through the eyes of the people who used to work there, and explores the future through those of the people who will move into the new apartments. In a series of five strikingly photographed interviews with retired workers, personally inflected vignettes unfold of the recent history of China, as it moves past the Korean War through the political campaigns of Communist Party rule right up to the full-throttle capitalist present. These documentary interviews are combined with four “staged” interviews of actors playing characters connected with the factory, providing a mix of real and fictional stories that complicate and inflect the viewer’s experience. Jia’s experiment makes palpable both irretrievable loss and irresistible progress, two inextricably bound incommensurables in China’s ongoing post-Revolutionary revolution.

Free for members or with Museum admission. Film only: $8 general, $7 students and seniors.

Whitsell Auditorium