For several years now, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki (b. 1979) has been documenting everyday life in the People’s Republic of China as it undergoes a string of rapid transformations. Working often in collaboration with others, the prolific Sniadecki has already amassed a remarkably diverse but consistently fascinating body of work. The HFA has been presenting his work since he was a doctoral student in Harvard’s Social Anthropology department and a part of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. We are pleased to welcome him back to present his two latest films.

The diversity of Sniadecki’s work reflects not only the reality of contemporary China but also the filmmaker’s ongoing research into the varieties of nonfiction filmmaking. Coming in the wake of the observational Demolition and the virtuosic one-shot People’s Park comes The Iron Ministry, an immersion into the sensory worlds-within-worlds aboard China’s trains, and Yumen, a dispersive and discursive look at a ghost town that is both dead and alive. – David Pendleton