Jia Zhangke is a name inseparable from contemporary cinema, especially this year. Over the past few months, he has appeared at major festivals worldwide, championing cross-cultural exchange: first the Taipei Film Festival in June, then Venice in August, Busan in mid-September, and finally his own Pingyao International Film Festival (PYIFF) at the end of the month.

For Jia, a festival is more than a screening schedule; it is a meeting place where filmmakers and audiences discover one another and new work gains momentum. Venice, for instance, introduced him to directors like Kim Ki-duk, Takeshi Kitano, and later Park Chan-wook. Years of producing films for emerging talents also convinced him that individual effort alone was too limited—what was needed was infrastructure, a platform. That idea became PYIFF, held each late September in the 2,800-year-old walled city of Pingyao in his home province of Shanxi. The festival focuses on Chinese-language and international competitions and highlights a director’s first three features, a clear promise to early-career filmmakers. Its mission is a two-way bridge: to bring bold world cinema to Chinese audiences and to showcase the vitality of Chinese filmmaking abroad. Only nine editions in, PYIFF is already a vital route for foreign films entering China and for Chinese films seeking European distribution.

The ninth PYIFF opened a few days ago and will run through September 30, presenting warmly received titles from around the world, including:

• Amoeba (2025) by Tan Si-you — Toronto & Busan
• Mr. Kim Goes to the Cinema (2025) by Kim Dong-ho — Busan
• Resurrection (2025) by Bi Gan — Cannes
• The Sun Rises on Us All (2025) by Cai Shang-jun — Venice
• The World of Love (2025) by Yoon Ga-eun — Toronto
• Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) by Sho Miyake — Locarno

This festival impulse mirrors Jia’s broader artistic philosophy. Film language, he argues, must evolve as the world does. Politics, economics, and technology continually reshape daily life; old forms often fail to capture new textures of experience. Innovation, for Jia, is not a stylistic whim but a responsibility. That belief underpins his own work and helps explain why Still Life (2006) remains strikingly contemporary nearly two decades after its Venice Golden Lion win.

Set amid the transformation of the Three Gorges region, Still Life follows two parallel searches, one man looking for his ex-wife, one woman for her missing husband, while the very landscape is being erased and rebuilt. The immense Three Gorges Dam symbolizes economic acceleration but also displacement: mass resettlement, submerged towns, and the erosion of memory. On location, Jia sensed the surreal force of such rapid change and wove it into a realist frame. Hence the film’s iconic ruptures, a riverside building ascending like a spacecraft, a tightrope strung between demolition sites, visions born from reality itself.

Internationally, Still Life was hailed as a landmark, praised for blending documentary observation with sudden, lyrical invention. Critics noted how it redefined realism: not the absence of imagination, but precisely the invention needed to express a reality changing at dizzying speed. In China, the reception mixed admiration with debate. Independent film circles celebrated its honesty and restraint, while others found its pace and tonal shifts challenging—qualities that, for supporters, give it lasting power. As migration, heritage loss, and uneven development have entered mainstream discourse, the film’s once “arthouse” images now read as urgent social testimony.

The convictions behind Still Life, attention to lived reality, and openness to new cinematic grammar also drive PYIFF. In that sense, the festival is not separate from Jia’s films but an extension of them: another instrument tuned to the same key.

Written by Jane Wei

Featured image courtesy of PYIFF

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