The Independent
September 11, 2006

‘Many journalists, international and national, wrote reports and questioned the Three Gorges project. But once it was completed they stopped. I know the population is still suffering from it.’ — filmmaker Jia Zhangke

Beijing: Jia Zhangke, China’s hippest film director, has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Still Life, his movie about one of the country’s most controversial subjects, the Three Gorges Dam. … The French actress Catherine Deneuve, who headed the prize jury, praised the beauty of the cinematography and said the story was moving without being political Still Life may not be explicitly political, but it is hard to avoid the political aspect of the Three Gorges Dam project.