Dong (2006)

China's greatest living filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) travels with acclaimed painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social ... See full summary »

Director:

Zhangke Jia

Writer:

Zhangke Jia

Stars:

Xiaodong Liu, Sanming Han

2 wins & 1 nomination.

Cast

Credited cast:
Xiaodong Liu	...	Self

Storyline

China's greatest living filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) travels with acclaimed painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China's Three Gorges Dam project. In DONG, Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being "de-constructed" by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu's paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects' shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.

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Plot Keywords:

china | painting | painter | sex worker | brothel | 

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Genres:

Documentary | Drama

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Did You Know?

Connections

References Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

User Reviews

A completely pointless, mindless going-nowhere, telling-nothing

patched up work, tried so hard to look deep but ended up telling nothing with any meaningful purpose. This film might give you a very natural, without pretentiousness descriptions of the miserable daily lives of the Chinese and the Thai people. Focused on the Chinese who were bunch of uneducated hard labors and the prostitutes in the big city of Thailand, through the eyes and brush of a Chinese painter. But all in all, the whole movie told nothing but meaningless and shallowness of the director's pretentious approach to tell nothing out of nothing. The whole movie was like the painter's paintings, although lined up in sequential orders from left to the right or right to the left, but none of them matched up correctly with each other, the colors of every part of the long combination of those paintings were completely different and out of proportion to each other.

The director had tried to use the camera without any feeling, not like human eyes but cold and mindless camera lens. The director with his camera lens caught his objects that he wanted to prescribe to the viewers/audiences, and then they inevitably became the 2nd cold, feeling-less and heartless lens to watch the monotonous portrayals scene after scene. There's no sympathy, no passion, no normal human feelings to any frame of this film. It's a long journey of nothingness and pretentiousness, going nowhere, telling nothing, wasting all the time, lives and money of the production and the audiences.

We usually describe a boring film so boring that it was more interesting by watching paint dry or seeing the ants on the ground in their lifeline to somewhere unknown on both ends. This is exactly the tag of this film; a film with big NADA inside out.

Details

Country:

Hong Kong China

Language:

Mandarin Thai

Release Date:

18 November 2006 (Hong Kong)

Also Known As:

Istok

Filming Locations:

Bangkok, Thailand

Company Credits

Production Co:

Xstream Pictures, X Stream Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

66 min 66 min

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1