Platform

154 minutes | 2000 | Fiction | Shanxi Dialect | English Subtitles

In the early stages of the Reform Era, life is like a racing train, echoing with whistling hope and a relentless surge of power. 

As the reforms deepen, the young actors of the Shanxi Fenyang County Art Troupe yearn to escape their small-town confines. Inside the dance halls, disco music reverberates, while postcards from Guangzhou reveal a vibrant, romantic world beyond. The allure is irresistible.

Pop songs blow in the wind, yet the Fenyang mountains loom too high. 

The water starts to boil. A young couple, cradling their child, has long abandoned their once-friend, the poet Pushkin.

Platform is the second film of JIA Zhangke’s “Hometown Trilogy”. He once mentioned: “The fantasy and yearning for the world beyond that permeate Platform is something I have experienced myself. ” 

The seismic shifts of 1980s China evoke joy for some, and despair for others. Is the small town a linchpin of reformist ambition, or a veiled blemish on the status quo? Underneath the town walls, the coal mine road stretches out into vast desolation. What you are fighting against is exactly what you possess. Thanks to those who ventured forth and returned, Fenyang’s dust is carried across the ocean, brushing the shores of the American continent, which seems unreachable.

Twenty-four years and counting, Platform remains one of the best Chinese films in the world. Are Fenyang’s youth still cloaked in solitude? Perhaps the truth lies only in traversing China’s small towns. (LIU Yuetong)

JIA Zhangke was born in 1970 in Fenyang, Shanxi Province of China. He graduated from Beijing Film Academy and made his first feature film Xiao Wu in 1998. Since then, he has been actively involved in filmmaking over China. His Still Life won the Golden Lion Award at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in 2006. In 2017, Jia, together with former Venice festival head Marco Mueller, launched the Pingyao International Film Festival in his home province. His latest feature, Caught by the Tides, was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.