Still Life (2006 film)

Still Life (三峡好人, Sanxia haoren, literally "The Good People of the Three Gorges") is a 2006 drama film directed by Jia Zhangke, set in the town of Fengjie as it is demolished and flooded for the Three Gorges Dam project. It follows two outsiders from Shanxi, a coal miner searching for the wife who left him sixteen years earlier and a nurse seeking her estranged husband to ask for a divorce. The film won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in 2006.^{1 • 2}

Origins and production

From documentary to fiction. Jia first came to the Three Gorges in 2005 to shoot a documentary about the painter Liu Xiaodong, who was working there on oil paintings. Drawn to the region, he decided to set a fiction film there as well; the documentary Dong (2006) and Still Life were shot in the same area at the same time and in places share the same shots.^{8 • 9} The film was shot in July 2005 in Fengjie county, Chongqing.¹⁰

The project began under the title The Good People of Sichuan (四川好人), a homage to Bertolt Brecht's play of that name, and was originally not about Three Gorges migrants at all; the setting changed only after Jia arrived to film Dong.¹⁰ Jia said the Three Gorges backdrop stood for the whole of China after its enormous transformation, and that he wanted to portray people whose inner lives the media coverage of the dam, which left once the dam took shape, had not captured.¹¹

The Three Gorges project itself, begun by the Chinese government in 1994 with its initial phase completed in 2006, involves the resettlement of more than one million people and the submergence of more than a dozen cities with two to three thousand years of history.^{12 • 13}

Casting. The lead actor Han Sanming is Jia's own cousin, a coal miner in Shanxi who had appeared in small roles in Jia's earlier films Platform and The World; Jia said making the film let the cousins, whose lives had diverged, come to understand each other again.¹¹ Zhao Tao, Jia's frequent lead, played Shen Hong without makeup, describing the role as one expressed through glances, breathing, and small gestures rather than outward conflict.¹¹

Style

Still Life is built on long, largely still or laterally moving takes that let the demolished surroundings guide the viewer's experience, with cinematography by Yu Lik-wai favoring natural light.⁶ Against this realist base, Jia inserts unexplained fantastic images: a UFO crosses the sky above the valley, a monument suddenly lifts off like a rocket, and a man walks a tightrope between two buildings.^{11 • 3} Jia explained these intrusions by the region's long association with mystery and legend, and by a China changing in ways that exceed imagination; he called the surreal part of the real.¹¹ Critics have linked this mixture to magical realism.¹⁴

The film is divided into chapters titled with four characters: cigarette, liquor, sugar, and tea (烟、酒、糖、茶). Jia said these are the simple goods ordinary Chinese life depends on, which also mediate relationships, since people offer cigarettes, bring sugar to the sick, and exchange tea when visiting; they stand for the still things, the overlooked realities, that give the film its English title.¹¹

Themes

Jia framed the film as a portrait of people left behind by change. He noted that when the dam was under construction, world media covered the relocations intensively, then left, and the residents bore the consequences alone; the film records their choices about what to give up and what to take up as the old town disappears and the new one is unfinished.^{11 • 5} The Busan festival's program note reads the closing tightrope walk, shown alongside laborers setting out for coal-mining jobs, as the image of people who must destroy with their own hands the place that was their livelihood, for whom a dangerous mine is the only hope of survival.¹⁵

Release and reception

Still Life premiered at Venice on 6 September 2006 as a surprise, late entry in the main competition, where it won the Golden Lion; the jury was led by Catherine Deneuve.^{11 • 16} Jia's documentary Dong, screening in the Horizons section at the same festival, received two awards from Italian and European film bodies.¹⁰ The prize established Jia, then in his tenth year of filmmaking, as a leading figure among the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese directors; The New York Times called him one of the world's most important filmmakers.^{10 • 17} The film reached British cinemas through the BFI in February 2008 and has since been a fixture of retrospective programs, screened at festivals from Rotterdam to Busan and in 35mm repertory series.^{3 • 1 • 4}

Reported running times differ among archival sources: 108 minutes is the figure given by the IFFR, Karlovy Vary, and Big World Pictures catalogs, while the BFI lists 109 minutes, Eye Filmmuseum 111 minutes, and Busan 112 minutes.^{1 • 2 • 17 • 12 • 15}

References

1. Still Life (Sanxia haoren), International Film Festival Rotterdam catalog
2. Still Life, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
3. Still Life, Independent Cinema Office / BFI
4. Still Life, Austin Film Society
5. Still Life, A Big World Pictures release
6. Still Life, Cornell Cinema
7. Dilemma in an Era of Change: Place and Space (academic chapter on Still Life)
8. 贾樟柯《三峡好人》创作的心理空间, 参考网
9. Still Life (2006), University of Washington, East Asia Resource Center film notes
10. 移民精神撼影坛——《三峡好人》, 重庆时报 via 文化素质网
11. 《三峡好人》发布会 贾樟柯谈创作初衷, 新浪娱乐
12. Still Life, Eye Filmmuseum
13. 贾樟柯讲座, 搜狐
14. On magical realism in Still Life, Journal of Korean Studies (KCI)
15. Still Life program note, Busan International Film Festival archive
16. Still Life, Busan International Film Festival archive search
17. Chinese film Still Life to be screened at BFI, Chinese Embassy in the UK

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

© 2026 Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Embed a reference card.