West Of The Tracks
(Tiexi qu)

It sometimes happens that a film, and the gesture that drives it, evidences such indisputable historicity that it attains in itself the status of event. That is not to say that West of the Tracks comes to us with the pretention of being a manifesto on anything at all. It simply gives visibility on a human scale to a massive historical upheaval and the work of a man who takes up a small amateur camera with stubborn lucidity. A lone man, a mini DV camera, the gigantic industrial city of Shenyang with its dying Tei Xi steel complex, a switch of track for the ideological path of history through to the extinction of a whole world: in West of the Tracks, China and its cinema enter a new age, facing challenges whose size has no parallel in history. To remember this, there will remain this monumental nine-hour-long vestige. JB