USELESS

Three stages of the clothing industry. In the textile factories of Guangdong, workers bend over huge machines for little pay. In Paris, the fashion designer Ma Ke presents her new collection: handmade haute couture worked from natural materials, whose name “Wu Yong” – “useless” – gives the film its title. And in a dusty mining town in Shanxi, the director’s home province, a tailor sits in his workshop, having given up needle and thread to work in the pit. Jia Zhangke’s documentary “Useless” (China 2007) places these three worlds side by side, asking what clothing is worth and who makes it.

Cinematographer Yu Lik-wai finds slow, plaintive images for the dehumanisation that China’s industrial revolution brings with it; the result is a portrait of globalisation at the level of the individual, meditative and without accusation. At the Venice Film Festival in 2007, the film won the award for best documentary in the Orizzonti section. “Useless” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2008, in the Spezial Dokumente section.

Shown at the 2008 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2008 · Film Archive