Shot in the old village of Fengjie, a small town on the Yangtze River slowly being destroyed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, Still Life tells the story of two people in search of their spouses.

[2] It premiered at a handful of other film festivals and received a limited commercial release in the United States on January 18, 2008, in New York City.

Like The World, Jia's previous film, Still Life was accepted by Chinese authorities and was shown uncensored in both mainland China and abroad.

Into this dying town comes Han Sanming, a coal miner from Shanxi province who has returned in search of a wife who ran away 16 years ago.

Shen Hong's husband, Guo Bin, left their home in Shanxi two years earlier and makes only token attempts to keep in contact.

She eventually enlists the help of her husband's friend Wang Dongming, who lets her stay at his home as the two seek Guo Bin.

Finally, the film returns to Sanming, who has been working at demolishing buildings for some time when Brother Mark is fatally injured in a collapse of a wall (or perhaps murdered during a "job" contracted out by Guo Bin to gather a gang of youths to intimidate the inhabitants of a rival piece of real estate).

"[3] She continues: "Antonioni’s influence on Mr. Jia is pronounced, evident in the younger filmmaker’s manipulation of real time and the ways he expresses his ideas with images rather than through dialogue and narrative.

"[7] Visually, the film's use of high definition similarly creates unusually "crisp" imagery that draws attention to the beauty of both the natural environment and the decaying urban landscape.

They range from subtle (the tightrope walker near the end of the film) to the obvious, including two CGI images: one of a UFO, which serves to divide the stories of Shen Hong and Sanming, and a modernist building that launches upward like a rocket.

"[9] Some critics found this arbitrary,[1] but Shelly Kraicer writes of the title cards: They stand in as replacements for the standard four household items (fuel, rice, cooking oil, and salt) that represent the daily necessities of life in a set Chinese expression.

Those looking to find support for an ambivalent interior critique of the concomitant pleasures and dangers of turning cinema itself into a series of tantalizingly consumable items could do worse than start here.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Zhangke spellbindingly captures the human cost of rapid industrialization in modern China.

"[3] Other critics, like J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, praised the film and noted the more political undertones, consciously drawing contrast to the Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou and his more recent big-budget epics.