Background
In Public was made and submitted by Jia as part of a program at the 2001 Jeonju International Film Festival, where three directors were asked to produce a short film in digital video. The other two directors who produced entries that year were Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and British director John Akomfrah. Setting up his camera in a train station in Datong, Jia would eventually cobble together a film consisting of thirty shots over forty-five days.
Lacking in any formal plot, the film instead is content to capture seemingly mundane moments, customers asking for the train schedule, shots inside public buses, etc. The result, according to Chinese film scholar Berenice Reynaud, is a film that captures the "ennui, backwardness, and dreary atmosphere of a small town, and the impatience, hidden desires and private concerns of its inhabitants." For Jia, the film was a chance to focus on the public spaces in a modern provincial city of China: the train stations, discos, and karaokes of Datong.
Read more about this topic: In Public (film)
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