Film · Around the world
born 1970 · Chinese
Sixth Generation of Chinese cinema
Jia Zhangke is the leading figure of the Sixth Generation — the Chinese filmmakers who followed Zhang Yimou's Fifth Generation and rejected its lacquered historical epics for documentary-toned, present-tense stories of provincial drifters, migrant workers and demolished towns. He began as an illegal, unapproved "underground" director shooting on video in his native Shanxi, was eventually licensed by the state, and won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2006. His subject throughout is what China's breakneck transformation costs the people standing in its way.
A provincial pickpocket loses his friend, his girlfriend and finally his freedom, ending handcuffed to a wire in the street while a crowd stares (1997)
Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) — his unlicensed debut, shot for a few hundred thousand yuan in his home town.
A state-run song-and-dance troupe in a Shanxi town is privatised across the 1980s, drifting from Mao-era anthems to perms and pop (2000)
Platform — often called the masterpiece of the Sixth Generation.
Performers in a Beijing theme park of world landmarks send text messages to one another beneath a scale-model Eiffel Tower (2004)
The World — the first of his features approved by the Chinese censors.
A man searching for the wife he bought sixteen years ago and a woman looking for her husband converge on a town being demolished before the reservoir fills (2006)
Still Life — won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2006; set in Fengjie, drowned by the Three Gorges Dam.
Four separate stories of ordinary people driven to sudden violence, drawn from incidents that had gone viral on Chinese social media (2013)
A Touch of Sin — Best Screenplay at Cannes; never released in China.
A woman's life in three chapters dated 1999, 2014 and 2025, each shot in a different aspect ratio, ending with her dancing alone in the snow (2015)
Mountains May Depart.
A gangster's moll takes the blame for firing a gun and spends seventeen years trying to recover the man she saved (2018)
Ash Is Purest White — its Chinese title means 'The Sons and Daughters of Jianghu'.
Two decades of unused footage from the director's own archive, recut into a near-wordless story of a woman crossing China after a man who left (2024)
Caught by the Tides — assembled from material shot from 2001 onwards; competed for the Palme d'Or.