“The World”: The Desperate Dreams Of Migrant Workers

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The “Village Voice” called Chinese director Jia Zhangke “the world’s greatest filmmaker under forty”. “THE WORLD” (2005, 140mins) is his most inventive and touching work to date. He casts a compassionate eye on daily loves, friendships and desperate dreams of the twenty-something’s from China’s remote provinces who come to live and work at Beijing’s “World Park”. A bizarre cross-cultural pollination of Las Vegas and the Epcot Center, “World Park” features lavish shows performed amid scaled-down replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids and even the “Twin Towers”. But Jia Zhangke pushes past the kitsch potential of this surreal setting…