Film Festivals

2015 Cannes Critics’ Panel Day 8: Zhangke’s “Mountains May Depart” Sees “The World” as Capitalist

Published on May 21, 2015

Almost splitting his time equally between the Lido and the Croisette, with almost a dozen features in (a mix of fiction and docus), Jia Zhangke first arrived in Cannes back in 2002 with Unknown Pleasures, 2008’s 24 City, followed those up with docu offering in 2010’s Un Certain Regard selected I Wish I Knew, and of course, wowed the establishment in 2013 with A Touch of Sin — which won for Best Screenplay. Re-teaming with his muse and wife Zhao Tao, Zhangke uses the vignettes approach again with a sprinkling of the English language in Mountains May Depart — in what Variety describes as a “polymorphous snapshot of 21st-century capitalism“. As you can see below, our critics are all over the map on this title.

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Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).