A train goes across China. In each one of its many wagons, hundreds of persons with their own stories and points of view travel every day, covering huge distances. China’s railway system is imaginably complex if you take into account the country’s area, its population density and its technical development. The laying of the tracks, which penetrate the territory and scatter like the veins inside a living being, not only communicate, but also offer one of the most complex paintings of a society. That’s why, by focusing on the variety of persons who inhabit that world in motion, in their gazes, in their trivial conversations, J. P. Sniadecki examines the blood of a country. As a specialist in that culture, his previous films, Chaiqian, People’s Park and Yumen, are interested in the same. With The Iron Ministry, the viewpoints of the filmmaker and the anthropologist come together in order to achieve one of the most interesting experiences born from the SEL (Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab), one of the most important centers of visual anthropology in current cinema, which was also responsible for such films as Leviathan and Manakamana. LL
Section: Competencia Vanguardia y GéneroD, F, E, DA, PE: J. P. Sniadecki
S: J. P. Sniadecki, Ernst Karel
P: J. P. Sniadecki, Joshua Neves
J. P. Sniadecki
T +1 269 267 2335 E jpsniadecki@gmail.com
W theironministry.com
He was born in Michigan, USA, in 1979, and studied Anthropology at Harvard. He directed the documentaries Songhua (2007), Demolition (2008), The Yellow Bank, Sichuan Triptych (both in 2010) and Foreign Parts (2010; Bafici ‘11) together with Véréna Paravel. He’s a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and teaches a film cla...
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
