General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202611 min read

24 City (二十四城记)

24 City (二十四城记) is a 2008 Chinese docufiction film directed by Jia Zhangke that mixes interviews with real former workers of Factory 420 in Chengdu with scripted monologues performed by professional actors, telling the story of a state-owned munitions factory demolished and replaced by a luxury apartment complex of the same name.¹^•² It was shot on high-definition video, screened in Competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and runs 112 minutes in its Cannes version.³^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Jia Zhangke, 2008, China; screenplay co-credited to Zhai Yongming³
Subject	Factory 420 (later the Chengfa Group), a state munitions complex in Chengdu with about 30,000 workers and 100,000 family members on 840 mu of land, demolished for the "24 City" residential development⁴
Form	Five authentic interviews and four fictional monologues delivered by actors but presented in documentary format²
Cast	Lu Liping, Joan Chen, Chen Jianbin, and Zhao Tao play the fictional interviewees; Zhao Tao plays Su Na and Joan Chen plays Little Flower³^•⁵
Festival	In Competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival; 112 minutes³
Critical reception	Metascore of 75 ("Generally Favorable") on Metacritic from 11 critic reviews⁶
Release	Chinese theatrical release in March 2009; distribution rights sold to more than 30 countries⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Chengdu, Sichuan, in the 2000s. Workers stream through the gates of Factory 420, a vast munitions and aeronautics plant built in 1958 that secretly manufactured military aircraft engines and employed nearly 30,000 people ¹⁷. In the factory auditorium, employees gather to commemorate the transfer of the land to a property developer, and the demolition begins ¹⁸. Between long, patient shots of the dying compound come the interviews: a man who arrived from Shanghai as a young technician in 1958, a former party official, a quality-control inspector, and a television news segment performed by interviewee Zhao Gang, who then shops for one of the new apartments in the sales showroom ¹⁸.

The oldest interviewee is Hao Dali (Lü Liping), who joined the factory at 21 in 1958, its first year ¹⁷. She tells of the boat journey from Shanghai to Chengdu during which her three-year-old son was lost, a monologue Rosenbaum calls heartbreaking, delivered in the flat cadence of someone who stopped expecting sympathy long ago ¹⁹. Around her, the stories trace the arc of the factory's whole life: workers' children who grew up speaking Sichuanese to parents who never lost their Shanghai accent, the downsizing after the Vietnam War when the plant turned to consumer products, and the layoffs of the 1990s that scattered a community the factory had once housed, schooled, and buried entire ¹⁷.

The monologue everyone remembers belongs to Joan Chen, playing a Shanghai worker nicknamed "Little Flower." Jia shoots her in a long take, her profile framed in a bifurcated mirror, and the image carries a private joke: Little Flower was the name of the character in a 1979 classic, and the actress playing her is the same woman who starred in it ²⁰. Her story is built from dates, wages, and a specific hurt rather than sentiment: a youth consumed by the factory's honor culture, a university place denied, the ordinary compensations of a private life denied after that. Because it is constructed like documentary testimony, it lands like documentary testimony, and the meta-casting adds a second layer about how the state once used beautiful faces as propaganda.

The demolition itself gets the film's most physical sequence. After lingering shots of rubble, wooden planks, and crumbling walls, a stone smashes through a factory window, then several more, an act of violence from unseen hands that sounds like rain coming to wash the historical artifact away ²¹.

The last interview belongs to the youngest speaker, Su Na (Zhao Tao), born in 1982 in Chengdu, who escaped the factory entirely and works as a personal shopper for rich women, defending her capitalist career without apology ²². Her childhood memory of searching for her mother on the deafening factory floor is one of the film's lingering images ²². The film closes in the new 24 City itself: a young sales employee singing to prospective buyers in a showroom, model apartments on sale over the graves of the world the film has spent a hundred minutes memorializing. Nothing is editorialized; the contrast between the wages quoted earlier and the asking prices of the flats does all the work.

Characters

Hao Dali (Lü Liping) is the factory's oldest witness, hired in 1958 at 21, a woman whose life and losses are bound to the plant's history, first seen carrying an IV drip bottle ¹⁷.

Little Flower (Joan Chen) is the Shanghai beauty whose youth was spent by the factory, a role that mirrors the actress's own star-making part ²⁰.

Su Na (Zhao Tao) is the generation that left, born in 1982, a personal shopper who represents the China that replaced the work-unit world ²².

A factory apprentice (Chen Jianbin) gives the interview critics singled out as the most touching, a reunion scene ²³.

The four actors share the screen with four actual factory workers, drawn from 130 interviews Jia conducted with former employees ²⁰.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's method is itself the controversy: four professional actors deliver scripted monologues interpolated as actual interviews, with no on-screen acknowledgment of which is which ²⁰. Jia's defense is implicit in the form: the performances were built from real interview material, and his claim is that performed and lived memory of this era are now inseparable. Some critics accept the wager completely; others see a documentary borrowing authority it has not earned.

Sequels, prequels, and universe

None. The film stands alone, though it grows out of Jia's run of documentary and fiction work around Still Life and Dong, and Zhao Tao is his longtime collaborator ²³.

The factory and its demolition

The film's starting point is a real estate transaction. Factory 420, a military factory in Chengdu also known as the Chengfa Group, occupied 840 mu of land east of the city's Second Ring Road for 50 years and had nearly 30,000 workers and 100,000 family members. Within a single year the factory was to relocate and be demolished, and the site would become "24 City", a large commercial residential development whose construction was projected to continue for 30 years.⁴ Jia Zhangke said that reading these figures in the news made him "shudder," and that the transformation of a factory of ten thousand into a commercial property development was what drew him to the subject.⁴

The factory's own history reaches back to 1958, when, in response to the Third Front (1960s Chinese campaign moving industry to interior provinces) construction campaign, a factory in Shenyang with 3,000 workers was transferred to Chengdu.⁵ For decades after the war it was a top-secret military center for manufacturing weapons.¹ At the Cannes press conference Jia said that "Factory 420 is the repository of fifty years of history; tens of thousands of workers spent much of their lives here," and that he had to begin shooting quickly because the memory of the planned economy tied to the factory was about to disappear.⁸

Form: documentary and fiction

The film consists of five authentic interviews and four fictional monologues delivered by actors but presented in a documentary format.² Jia has explained the different origins of the four performed roles. Lu Liping's story is a real one from Factory 420, that of a mother who lost her child at Fengjie while following the military factory in its transfer; Joan Chen's character, Little Flower, is a composite assembled from the recollections of many women workers who entered the factory in 1978 and 1979; Chen Jianbin represents the male workers of that era; and Zhao Tao's part is entirely fictional, since Jia felt the young generation was close enough to contemporary life to be imagined.⁹ In another interview he said that Chen Chen's (Joan Chen's) role condensed the memories of more than a dozen Shanghai women workers he had interviewed, and that without fiction the film's historical information would have become very narrow.¹⁰

Scholars have read the film as a key work of docufiction. Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, a cinema studies scholar at Oberlin College, argues that by combining professional actors with interviews of actual state employees, the film creates a hybrid language that addresses the limits of postsocialist realism and documentary in narrating workers' emotional struggles with history, using narrative ellipsis, tableaux shots, and intertextual references in the spirit of what Gilles Deleuze called "the power of the false."¹¹ The use of actors playing fictional roles inserted silently among real people was controversial at the film's Cannes premiere; Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that on re-viewing, the formal daring was what impressed him and called the film "an austere kind of realist poetry on screen."¹ A Korean study describes the method as a "fake documentary" narration style.¹²

The film also works against the plainness of the interview format. Critics noted its static camera, long takes, inter-titled poetry (including poems by Yeats), non-diegetic music, and silence, devices that shift the film's register from the documentary to the psychological.¹³^•⁷ The score is credited to Yoshihiro Hanno and Lim Giong.³

Characters and memory

The eight figures span three generations, from older workers nostalgic for the socialist past to young people pursuing success in the new economy; the Cannes synopsis describes their stories as "the History of China."³ Zhao Tao plays Su Na, a factory's second-generation daughter in her twenties who does business between Hong Kong and Chengdu and dreams of earning enough to buy her hard-working parents a flat in the new 24 City development.² Joan Chen's character is ironically a worker known on the factory floor for her resemblance to the movie star Joan Chen.²

Jia has said the film is built from details of collective memory, citing shared era-markers such as the television drama Blood Suspect (《血疑》), the film Little Flower, and the phrase "tingxinliuzhi" (stopping pay but keeping one's job), which he called codes of the past 50 years of Chinese daily life.⁹ He framed the film's subject as China's passage from a planned economy to a market economy, part of a century-long national effort to become a modern country, and said he hoped audiences could face this history with equanimity rather than avoidance.⁹

Reception

At Cannes in May 2008 the film drew attention for Jia's continued movement between fiction and documentary, with the technique described as more polished than in his earlier work.¹⁴ On Metacritic it holds a Metascore of 75, based on 11 critic reviews: 7 positive, 3 mixed, and 1 negative.⁶ Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal praised the vivid high-definition video and the interviews with workers, some played by themselves and some by actors, evoking a past of toil and suffering in the service of the Communist state.⁶ Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that the actors' performances, including Lv Liping's harrowing story of a lost child, constitute "another kind of monument to the workers of Factory 420."⁶ Derek Elley in Variety found the result more accessible than Jia's previous two pictures, with moments of genuine emotion from the real interviewees.⁶

The film's commercial entanglement with the development it documents drew criticism in China: some commentators called it an extended advertisement for the property project, since the title itself is the development's name and sales-related plot elements appear in the film. Jia responded that the film "does not say a single word in praise of the property development."⁷ By the time of the Chinese release in March 2009, rights had been sold to more than 30 countries, and Jia said the film had already recouped its costs abroad.⁷

Place in Jia Zhangke's work

24 City belongs to a run of films in which Jia, one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary China since his debut Xiao Wu (1997), engaged internal migration, social change, and class displacement since the Reform era; scholars group it with Still Life (2006) and Dong (2006) as his most significant engagement with these themes.¹⁵^•¹⁶ Jia himself placed the film in a sequence of works about ordinary people behind Chinese "spectacles": the World Park in The World, the Three Gorges Dam in Still Life, and the factory-to-real-estate conversion in 24 City.⁴ He also published a book of interviews with workers, China's Workers Interview Record (《中国工人访谈录》), drawn from the same research.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Documentary films by subject: people, identity, and communities

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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