Unknown Pleasures Details

Shooting on digital video in the rundown industrial town of Datong, director Jia Zhang Ke returns to the hustling street milieu of his earlier Xiao Wu in this wry look at the flip side of China's much-vaunted consumer boom. Wu Qiong and Zhao Wei Wei are persuasively indolent as the unemployed teenagers latching on to anything to occupy their abundance of time, with Wu's obsession with Zhao Tao (a self-deluded dancer with a brewery road show) providing much of the comic incident. But it's his fellow slacker's more considered approach to the future that proves more poignant, especially once he's diagnosed with hepatitis.

After the historical panorama of Platform, Jia's third feature (shot on DV) returns to the scale and style of Xiao Wu.... read more on Time Out