It's not often that a movie depicts the transformation of an entire landscape, but that's what we see in Still Life Sanxia haoren , a docudrama filmed in the area behind China's massive Three Gorges Dam project.
The massive government dam system has uprooted 1. Director Jia Zhang-Ke went to Fengjie to make a documentary about a painter, but was so fascinated by what he saw that he immediately changed his plans. Still Life tells the story of two people who come to the Yangtze River region impacted by the dam.
Poor miner Han Sanming himself is in search of a wife who left him sixteen years before, when his teenage daughter was a baby. His old neighborhood is already under water, and the only relatives he can find initially refuse to help. Shen Hong Zhao Tao is an attractive nurse who arrives from Shanxi to contact her husband and find out why he simply abandoned her two years before.
Fengjie has become more than a little like the Wild West. The city bustles with activity but everyone has plans to relocate. A scooter taxi driver cheats Sanming by delivering him to an address he knows to be underwater.
His new landlord won't accept the fact that he must evacuate; workmen climb buildings to painting markers showing how high the waters of the Yangtze will eventually reach. Sanming takes a job demolishing buildings and lives with a rowdy work gang that engages in fights with rival work crews. Although they appear to own nothing but the clothes they are wearing, many workers carry cell phones. Meanwhile, Shen witnesses a citizen group denouncing a local communist official about promises not kept.
