Critics reviews

Filmed over three years on Chinese trains, it's full of revelatory moments, and not only in its surprisingly outspoken interviews: the non-narrative stretches, which compare quite favourably with the more abstract portions of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2012), are pretty stunning as well. Skip this one at your peril.

...These scenes, aesthetically powerful though they are, actually feel like an abstraction smokescreen of sorts; to my mind, the heart of The Iron Ministry lives within the series of deeply profound, quietly extraordinary series of interactions between strangers that the film captures. There are several giddily transcendent moments that wield this sort of Wenders-ian blunt force in The Iron Ministry.

These conversations touch on aspects of Chinese society from a ground level in a way more organic and revealing than a hectoring exposé, capturing candid discussions on the status of Muslims, Tibet in relation to the country as a whole, factory labor and rising prices, and the prospects of representative government. In the course of 82 minutes the film covers vast literal, sociological, and aesthetic ground.

I prefer Sniadecki's latest to [People's Park] precisely because it's less concerned with serving a nifty formal conceit, and instead endeavors to see more clearly what's happening, and hear more intently what's being said. The camera never stops moving in The People's Park... while in The Iron Ministry it repeatedly stops to engage with passengers or listen in on conversations, and without sacrificing a larger sense of movement.

The Iron Ministry reveals a lot about China as an environment—simultaneously, almost everyone seems to smoke cigarettes while wind turbines pump away outside. It reminds one of what it was like to ride Amtrak twenty years ago, when the company routinely over-booked trains and still allowed smoking. The film feels like a new kind of hybrid documentary, mixing abstraction and cinéma vérité.

Though Sniadecki doesn't elucidate any broad structural motive, his film gradually adopts an engrossing rhythm among its clatter of steel and ambient chatter. Long, nearly silent passages are bracketed by unexpected flourishes of dialogue, some instigated by the director.

A thrillingly expansive portrait of China gleaned from the cramped compartments of its trains... Sniadecki yokes together different modes of documentary to illuminate a similarly multifaceted social terrain. Tangential to this, The Iron Ministry provides a welcome reminder that sensory ethnography need not preclude old-school documentary virtues like testimony and reportage.

Ministry‘s conceit is to stitch together years of Chinese train trips into one endless journey, in the most aesthetically buffeting/arresting fashion possible. It begins with close ups of juddering white lines, and it takes a bit to suss out whether these are rapidly passing tracks outside or the train's interior magnified to unrecognizable extremes.

As in his previous Yumen, [Sniadecki] twists the documentary genre toward the edge of surrealism, with palatable effects and endearing instances of black humour (sassy societal comments by a teenager; blasé outlook from members of ethnic minorities; a butcher cutting meat in the back of car…): China as a train heading to an unknown destination.

Though developed and shot concurrently with the SEL's rise to prominence—and while not produced in association with the Lab or its resources—The Iron Ministry, particularly with regard to its radically integrated visual and aural approach, feels very much of a piece with the collective's advances in formal conceptualization and stylistic articulation.

Why does The Iron Ministry slowly transform from an avant-garde statement into something rather conventional? ...The Iron Ministry is a rather odd work for many reasons, even if its depiction of class and ethnicity on various trains across modern China captures an essential moment.

The best Chinese film at the festival—and the best film about China in the twenty-first century that I've seen to date—was made by an American, J.P. Sniadecki... The result is a microcosm of China today: a country undergoing an industrial revolution, where the population is constantly on the move and where free and open debate takes place in public spaces among people of all educational, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, in spite of the absence of an overarching systemic democracy.