I Wish I Knew

Nominee
Un Certain Regard ~ Avenir Prize
Cannes Film Festival
Few filmmakers working today look as deeply at the changing world as Mr. Jia does, or make the human stakes as vivid.
-- Manohla Dargis, New York Times

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I Wish I Knew

Shanghai's past and present flow together in Jia Zhangke's poetic and poignant portrait of this fast-changing port city. Restoring censored images and filling in forgotten facts, Jia provides an alternative version of 20th century China's fraught history as reflected through life in the Yangtze city. He builds his narrative through a series of eighteen interviews with people from all walks of life-politicians' children, ex-soldiers, criminals, and artists (including Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien)-- while returning regularly to the image of his favorite lead actress, Zhao Tao, wandering through the Shanghai World Expo Park. (The film was commissioned by the World Expo, but is anything but a piece of straightforward civic boosterism.) A richly textured tapestry full of provocative juxtapositions.

"Four stars. Astonishing." – Guy Dixon, The Globe and Mail

"Wondrous yet rueful. Jia is simply one of the best and most important directors in the world." – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Not Rated
Genre
Documentary, History
Runtime
118
Language
Mandarin
Director
Zhangke Jia
Writer(s)
Zhangke Jia
Cast
Zhao Tao, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Awards:
Nominee, Un Certain Regard ~ Avenir Prize, Cannes Film Festival
FEATURED REVIEW
Joshua Brunsting, The CriterionCast

At just shy of two hours in length, 'I Wish I Knew' is a knotty, engrossing city picture that never holds the viewers hand while going on this journey, instead allowing for these fragments to paint a singular and, hopefully, moving portrait of a city in constant flux. A film about, in many ways, the ...

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