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City of Jade
(Fei cui zhi cheng)

Director in Person
Screening on Film
Directed by Midi Z.
Taiwan/Myanmar, 2016, DCP, color, 99 min.
Southwestern Mandarin and Burmese with English subtitles.

For close to a decade, the young Myanmar-born and Taiwan-based filmmaker Midi Z has dedicated himself to a cycle of work that looks critically yet compassionately at his homeland. Alternating between fiction and documentary, Midi Z’s films offer patient chronicles of the difficult lives of Burmese citizens, refugees and exiles whose struggles often closely mirror those of his own family. After moving to Taiwan to study graphic design, Midi Z gradually found his way to film school, directing short work that eventually caught the attention of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who encouraged and mentored the young filmmaker. With his first feature film, Return to Burma (2011), Midi Z announced the major themes of displacement, instability and national identity that would continue across his work, explored now through a portrait of a construction worker whose return to Myanmar after years working in Taiwan only reveals how little has changed.

In City of Jade, Midi Z turns his camera upon his own family, reuniting with his estranged older brother shortly after his release from prison in Mandalay and joining him on an epic and precarious voyage in search of treasure in one of the most dangerous regions in Asia today. A courageous and singular documentary, City of Jade enters into a treacherous yet fascinating part of the world rarely seen on screen, offering a steady, almost dispassionate perspective over the desperate, nearly impossible hunt for precious stones and fortune that inspires men to risk their health and lives. City of Jade is also, however, a unique family portrait that searches for the truth of the relationship between two brothers whose starkly different lives and worldviews have made them near strangers.

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