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Meanwhile, a woman named Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) is looking for her husband. He's been so busy making money that he hasn't bothered to check in on her for two years. Business is booming so loudly that its champions are deaf to the cries of those left behind.

Old and new are colliding in bizarre juxtapositions. Meandering children wander through the rubble singing ancient songs, while young men form gangs to rule among the ruins. A communist employer is confronted by an ever more assertive work force. A magician turns paper into money—one kind of currency, then another—which suggests another aspect of the people's bewilderment as the world changes. How can they possibly understand what is happening to them?

Zhao Tao as Shen Hong

In an American film, Sanming and Shen Hong would probably meet, commiserate, and fall in love. Nothing of the sort happens here. Jia isn't writing to fulfill the wishes of the audience. He's writing to testify of a people who have no power to see their own wishes fulfilled. The film's Chinese title, Sanxia haoren, translates "The Good People of Three Gorges."

Filming in high-definition video, cinematographer Yu Lik Wai seems awestruck by the environment. It looks like one of the most elaborate sci-fi wastelands ever filmed, but what makes Still Life so compelling is that all of this—the hollowed-out tenement structures that look like the smashed remains of wasps' nests, the collapsing towers, the masked and uniformed workers who stalk through the debris like alien invaders—is real.

Well, almost all of it. To give us a stronger sense of his characters' sense of alienation, Jia includes a few startling, whimsical flourishes. A skyscraper might just lift off like a rocketship and disappear, or a UFO might cruise across the landscape. Why not? To these common Chinese laborers, the world around them is turning into something like the Twilight Zone.

Viewers conditioned to expect fast action and rapid-cut editing may grow impatient with his slow, patient progress. More patient viewers will be rewarded with an experience unlike anything they've seen before. This film isn't about the thrill of What Happens Next. It's about spending time in one of the world's most extraordinary places. Jia takes it slow so we can comprehend the effects of calamitous change on the environment, on people, on history.

But the film is not entirely without hope. The last thing we see is a tightrope walker—a human being suspended in space on a line, somehow making progress one shaky step at a time.

Exploring the same context, documentarian Yung Chang crafts a vision that is equally surreal. Up the Yangtze is full of surprises.

Yung's journey home, to visit the fishing villages along the Yangtze's banks where his grandparents grew up, was not a happy one. It's painfully clear, as he follows a cruise liner from the "New Hong Kong" into Asia's longest river, that his family's past is being wiped from the landscape.

Rather than dwell on his own story, he takes us into the lives of an impoverished family who have fished along the river for generations. While their ramshackle home is about to be submerged, they're scrambling for survival on the edge of starvation.

Yu Shui (right) with her mother and sister

Their 16-year-old daughter Yu Shui dreams of going to high school, but her parents reject the idea. Weeping for shame, they explain that their survival depends on whatever money she can make.

So Yu Shui goes to work for Victoria Cruises on one of the "Farewell Tours" ships. These luxury cruises give Western tourists a chance to marvel at the wonder of China's progress.

It's a humiliating job, but Yu Shui's coworkers are competitive as they pander to Westerners' wishes. They're fighting to keep their jobs, get ahead, and find a place in an uncertain future. Their supervisor pep-talks them with English clichés: "You should have confidence in yourself. Where there is a will, there's a way. Rome was not built in a day." Yu Shui, homesick and lonely, can hardly contain her despair.

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