Still Life

Still Life is a Chinese drama directed by Jia Zhangke, set in Fengjie, a town on the Yangtze being demolished and submerged as the Three Gorges Dam project advances. Two visitors arrive among the rubble and relocations. Han Sanming, a coal miner, comes looking for a former wife he has not seen in sixteen years, and takes work on a demolition crew while he searches. Shen Hong, a nurse, is looking for a husband who has been out of touch for two years. Their separate errands unfold against a landscape of emptied buildings and people moving away.

Jia Zhangke wrote the screenplay with Jiamin Sun and Na Guan. The film sits between Unknown Pleasures, from 2002, and 3.11 A Sense of Home Films, from 2011, in his directing career. Han Sanming and Zhao Tao play the two leads, with Wang Hongwei, Zhubin Li, Lin Zhou and Lizhen Ma in supporting roles. It runs 108 minutes and was released in November 2006.

Audience responses diverge: on TMDB it holds a rating of 7.2 from 175 votes, while on IMDb it stands at 5.3 from 32 votes, a much smaller sample.