Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

The unnerving inside-out quality of Shutter Island’s psychological portrait draws from and builds on Scorsese’s beloved film noir tradition to a point of abstracting the genre, with its exaggerated visual motifs and fragmented subjectivity.

Jia assembles oral histories from individuals shaped by the political upheavals of the last fifty years, opening a new window onto their history and ameliorating a vacuous modernity brought upon Shanghai by the frenzy of the new millennium.

Four tableaux and two book-ends form Jia’s candid portrait of contemporary China, about the tragic injustices experienced by the nation’s underprivileged workers.

Made at the turn of the 1990s, the film both anticipates Hong Kong’s handover from British rule to mainland China in 1997, and evokes the past, specifically the 1960s; Days thus bears feelings of both longing nostalgia and reckless exuberance, personal displacement and political tumult.