The Iron Ministry
DIRECTOR: J.P. Sniadecki COUNTRY: China YEAR: 2014 LANGUAGE(S): Mandarin Chinese SUBTITLES: English RUNNING TIME: 82 min
SECTION: International Competition 2015
SYNOPSIS
A train, a country. Noises, pictures, even smells, a man who shares his just-slaughtered cow among people in the wagon, smog outside, people sleeping everywhere. J.P. Sniadecki spent three years traveling by train across China, observing the people in this moving microcosm. This is a laconic but very humorous panopticon of a country caught between tradition and modernity with a wealth of detail and visual accuracy that are reminiscent of Bruegel.
The ethnologist and filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki has long examined the transition in China. Always exploring the border between documentary and experimental cinema, in films such as YUMEN (2013, NIHRFF 8) und PEOPLE’S PARK (2012) he is examining the consequences of booming growth. THE IRON MINISTRY is the result of countless train journeys through China and shows the upheavals and devastation caused by the all-pervasive drive for modernization and also the lives of people seeking their place in this proverbial train of progress.
Almost without dialogue or interviews the film reveals a country at risk of choking on its own progress.
J.P. SNIADECKI
Born in Michigan in 1979, J.P. Sniadecki studied anthropology at Harvard University, specialising in China. His work which is shown at festivals and in museums all over the world, is linked to the productions of the Sensory Ethnography Lab in Harvard. His work has also received numerous awards, including the Joris Ivens Award at Cinema du Réel for DEMOLITION (2008), a Jury Award at FICUNAM for YUMEN (2013), as well as the Best Anthropological Film award at Festival dei Popoli and Best Cinematography award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for PEOPLE’S PARK (2012), a single shot film, co-directed with Libbie Cohn. Sniadecki currently teaches in the Documentary Media MFA program at Northwestern University.
FILMOGRAPHY
Working Classics (2002), Childrens’s Healing Initiative (2007), Songhua (2007), Demolition (2008), Foreign Parts (2010), The Yellow Bank (2010), People’s Park (2012), Yumen (2013), The Iron Ministry (2014)
PRODUCER: Joshua Neves CAMERA: J.P. Sniadecki EDITOR: J.P. Sniadecki
PRODUCTION: Cinder Films WORLD SALES: Natalia Arshavskaya, Antipode Sales & Distribution Llc