(Jia Zhang-ke, 2020, China, 113 minutes)

An amazingly versatile director, capable of making genre pictures, documentaries, big-budget studio films, and under-the-radar indies, all with the same high standard of quality, China’s Jia Zhang-ke has long been one of modern cinema’s most exciting and unpredictable talents. His newest feature, the documentary Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, has him in a much more reflective mode than what fans of his 2018 gangster film Ash is Purest White might expect. In Swimming Out we find Jia interviewing three influential authors, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong, therein interrogating history both personal and national through their respective lenses.

In Mandarin with English subtitles.