Jia Zhangke

Jia Zhangke (, born 24 May 1970) is a Chinese-language film and television director, screenwriter, producer, actor and writer.

He is the dean of the Shanxi Film Academy of Shanxi Media College and the dean of the Vancouver Film School of Shanghai University.

He graduated from the Literature Department of Beijing Film Academy.

He is generally regarded as a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" movement of Chinese cinema, a group that also includes such figures as Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye, Wang Quan'an and Zhang Yuan.

Jia's early films, a loose trilogy based in his home province of Shanxi, were made outside of China's state-run film bureaucracy, and therefore are considered "underground" films.

Platform is about a provincial dance and music troupe transitioning from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

The film has been called the masterpiece of the entire sixth generation movement.

Starring Wang Hongwei, Jia's classmate and star of Xiao Shan Going Home and Xiao Wu, Platform was also the first of Jia's films to star actress Zhao Tao, a former dance teacher.

His interest in film began in the early 1990s, as an art student at the Shanxi University in Taiyuan.

On a lark, Jia attended a screening of Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth.

The film, according to Jia, was life changing, and convinced the young man that he wanted to be a director.

Jia would eventually make it to China's prestigious Beijing Film Academy in 1993, as a film theory major, giving him access to both western and eastern classics, as well as an extensive film library.

While a student at the Beijing Film Academy, Jia would make three short films to hone his skills.

The first, a ten-minute short documentary on tourists in Tiananmen Square entitled One Day in Beijing, was made in 1994 on self-raised funds.

Though Jia has referred to his first directorial effort as inconsequential and "naive", he also described the short day and a half shoot as "excitement...difficult to express in words."

But it was Jia's second directorial effort, the short film Xiao Shan Going Home (1995), that would bring him to the attention of the film world.

It was a film that helped establish Jia's style and thematic interests and, in Jia's words, was a film that "truly marks the beginning of my career as a filmmaker."

Before graduating, however, Jia would make one more short film, Du Du (1996), a film about a female college student faced with several life-changing decisions.

The film, little seen and rarely available, was for Jia an exercise of experimentation and technique, as it was filmed without a script.

For Jia, the film was an important learning experience, even if he was "not terribly proud" of the end result.

Upon graduation, Jia embarked on his first feature-length film, with producer Li Kit Ming and cinematographer Yu Lik-wai.

Xiao Wu, a film about a pickpocket in Jia's native Fenyang, emerged from Jia's desire to capture the massive changes that had happened to his home in the past few years.

Additionally, the film was a rejection of what Jia felt was the fifth generation's increasing tendency to move away from the reality of modern China and into the realm of historical legend.

Shot on a mere 400,000 RMB budget (or about US$50,000), Xiao Wu would prove to be a major success on the international film circuit, bringing Jia a deal with Takeshi Kitano's production house.

Jia capitalized on his success with Xiao Wu with a two internationally acclaimed independent features.

Xiao Shan would eventually screen abroad where it won a top prize at the 1997 Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Awards.

More significantly, the film's success brought Jia in contact with cinematographer Yu Lik-wai and producer Li Kit Ming, two men who along with producer/editor Chow Keung would come to form Jia Zhangke's "core...creative team."

With their support, Jia was able to begin work on Xiao Wu, which would become his first feature film.

The first, Platform, was partially funded in 1998 through the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) of the Busan (Pusan) International Film Festival when Jia received the Hubert Bals Fund Award (HBF) for his project.

With 2002's Unknown Pleasures, Jia began a foray into filming in digital video (although his first experimentation with the medium came a year before, in 2001's short documentary In Public).

Xiao Wu, Platform and Unknown Pleasures are sometimes seen collectively as an informal trilogy of China's transition into modernity.

Unknown Pleasures, a meditation on the aimless "birth control" generation to emerge from the one-child policy helped cement Jia's reputation as a major voice in contemporary Chinese cinema.

All this despite limited theatrical runs and obscurity in mainland China.

Beginning in 2004, Jia's status in his own country rose when he was allowed to direct his fourth feature film, The World, with state approval.

Jia's films have received critical praise and have been recognized internationally, notably winning the Venice Film Festival's top award Golden Lion for Still Life.

He is the only Chinese who was awarded the Carrosse d'Or lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek hailed him as "one of the top directors in the world today."

Jia Zhangke was born in Fenyang, Shanxi, China.

Zhao would go on to serve as Jia's muse as the lead female role in Unknown Pleasures, The World, and Still Life, as well as acting in 24 City and the short film Cry Me a River (both in 2008).

(Ahn, Soo Jeong, The Pusan Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization, 2012, 104-105).