Platform

The masterpiece of the New Chinese Cinema, Jia's monumental Platform spans the 1980s by following four performers in the state-run Fenyang Peasant Culture Group. Based in Fenyang, the director's hometown in the remote province of Shanxi, these "art-workers" praise the late chairman Mao with approved regulatory classics. When Deng Xiao-ping institutes an "open door" cultural policy and China begins to move towards Western-influenced consumer capitalism, the newly privatized group starts to sport spandex and play electric guitars. It's sex, cigarettes and rock-n-roll... until dreams are deferred. Platform, the precursor to Jia's Unknown Pleasures, offers a vivid insight into modern China. Rich in detail and beautifully shot in long, fixed-camera tableaux, Platform exquisitely conveys a sense of time passing and ineluctable change.