Dong

Dong (2006)

东

Jia Zhangke travels with painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they 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. 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.

Date of release
2006-11-18
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (16)
Runtime
1h 5m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Jia Zhangke

Casting

Interesting facts

Dong is a 2006 documentary film by Chinese director, Jia Zhangke. The film follows the artist and actor Liu Xiaodong as he invites Jia to film him while he paints a group of labourers near the Three Gorges Dam and later a group of women in Bangkok. The film was produced and distributed by Jia's own production company, Xstream Pictures, based out of Hong Kong and Beijing.

Production

Jia Zhangke was invited by his friend, painter Liu Xiaodong at first to visit the Three Gorges Region located in South-east of China together, planning to film a documentary for the progress of his new painting series that mainly focuses on the demolition workers in that area and then towards Bangkok to paint female bar workers.

After their arrival, Jia decided to film another fictional film as well due to his shock of the poverty circumstances in the area, and this decision during their journey then successfully form two films in parallels, the documentary Dong and the fictional film Still Life.

Jia wrote the script for Still Life in three days in his hotel, and cast his cousin Han Sanming as a coal miner.

One of Liu’s worker model accidentally died during the process of filming, Liu and Jia then visited this worker’s family, gave photographs and gifts to his children.

Two films shared some similar footage and also the same protagonist under Jia’s exploration of the setting China Fengjie.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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