Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

See what’s playing

Critics reviews

TIE XI QU: WEST OF THE TRACKS - PART 1: RUST

Wang Bing China, 2002
A clock might tell us the time, but it also reminds us of the pressures, problems and economic trappings of its keeping. In this moment, Wang gives us so much: the young man is crying because his father is held prisoner . . . ; the silent observation also signals the futility of time in relation to incarceration without sentencing, as well as how it bears upon the unofficial incarceration of poverty.
April 10, 2018
Read full article
Wang Bing uses the camera not only to record history, or rather history-in-the-making, but to _write_ history. West of the Tracks is a cinematic document that, despite its running time, needs to be seen. It is not a beautiful film. You will look for beautiful frames in vain. It's an ugly film, it is not aesthetically pleasing. But neither is the subject matter. What Wang Bing shows shouldn't and cannot be made aesthetically pleasing. It's a simple document that asks to be taken as it is; raw, brutal, ugly.
May 18, 2017
When Wang arrived on the international festival circuit in 2002 with Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, a nine-hour portrait of three declining state-owned factories in northeast China, his voracious documentation felt like the ideal redress to the scarcity of art cinema grappling with China's modern-day predicament.
July 3, 2016
None of [the recent docs on China's rapidly mangled topography] possesses the sheer, brute force of Wang's film, which works an interesting variation on the cinema-of-duration. One can say that nine hours is too long a period of time to spend watching a film, especially one with such a limited entertainment value. At the same time, West of the Tracks is imbued to give a sense of incompleteness; the ultimate impression is one of intimate glimpses in transition.
March 1, 2014
Leaving the Factory: Wang Bing's Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (book)
Wang Bing’s overwhelming West of the Tracks [Tiexi qu] presents us with the panoramic spectacle of progress collapsing. . . . It is every twentieth-century mural depiction of the struggle for the good life-socialist or capitalist-viewed in reverse.
January 1, 2009
Cinética
At the end of the 9 hours of Wang Bing’s debut documentary, one doesn’t get three complementary portraits, but a single film in which the accumulation and circulation of visual and narrative elements are vital to generate a clear impression of the whole.
May 1, 2008
The New York Times
Capturing moments both large and small — a blast-furnace "mishap," a plaintive song on the radio asking "Baby, aren't you tired of this yet?" — this profoundly empathetic and humanist work bears witness to a vanished way of life and the real cost of progress. "Get this place on film now, because it won't be around much longer," advises one of Mr. Wang's stoic factory workers. Luckily for us, he did.
April 18, 2007