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West of the Tracks
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Secondary Title:
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(Tie Xi Qu)
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Filmmaker Name:
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Wang Bing
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Film Length:
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554 min
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Film Year:
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2003
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Duration:
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Over 120 min
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Decade:
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2000s
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Color:
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color
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Tie Xi is a massive industrial complex in northeastern China's Shenyang province. Built during the Japanese occupation of China and restructured with Soviet support after World War II, it is the country's oldest and largest manufacturing center. From the postwar period to the 1980s, the thriving factories employed more than a million workers, but like other state-run industries they began their collapse in the early 1990s.
In West of the Tracks, filmmaker Wang Bing documents the slow, inevitable death of an obsolete manufacturing system. Between 1999 and 2001 he meticulously filmed the lives of the last factory workers, a class of people once promised glory during the Chinese revolution. Now trapped by economic change, the workers become deeply moving film heroes in this modern epic. The film is an engrossing portrait of Chinese society in transition. Cahiers du Cinema compares Wang Bing to the great Russian writers and calls his film "a masterful production, an open file on realism." West of the Tracks "opens up a new and radical era in cinematography."
"Without question the greatest work to have come out of the Chinese documentary movement, and must be ranked among the most extraordinary achievements of world cinema in the new century." — Lu Xinyu, New Left Review
"Capturing moments both large and small...this profoundly empathetic and humanist work bears witness to a vanished way of life and the real cost of progress." — Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times
"A transfixing experience - if an undeniably demanding one - Wang Bing's nine-hour documentary on Chinese industrial decay should take its place as a key work of socially minded vérité" — Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
Screening Highlights
Grand Prize, International Documentary Festival, Marseille, 2003
Grand Prize, Festival du Film, Yamagata, 2003
Grand Prize, International Documentary Festival, Lisbon, 2002
Berlin International Film Festival, 2002
Montgolfiere d'Or Juried Prize for Documentary, 3 Continents Festival, Nantes
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca, NY, 2009
forumdoc.bh.2009, Brazil
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