The Land of Many Palaces

[BONUS ADDENDUM: Rent A Foreigner (NYTimes OpDoc) “The image has become the reality”]

Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. Photo by Michael Christopher Brown for Time.

The Land of Many Palaces
– a documentary by Song Ting and Adam James Smith –
Thursday, March 26 at 7:30pm

Winifred Moore Auditorium
470 E. Lockwood Ave., St. Louis, MO 63119

My review:
One more outstanding film about China…
As strikingly beautiful as it is chilling, this recent documentary allows us to see “the future,” more specifically what is planned for 250 millions of Chinese farmers. Done with much restraint, we primarily observe “what happens” as we enter today what was described back in 2010 by Time Magazine in a photo essay as a ghost city: “filled with office towers, administrative centers, government buildings, museums, theaters and sports fields—not to mention acre on acre of subdivisions overflowing with middle-class duplexes and bungalows.”

As of July 1 2014, China’s population was estimated to be 1,393,783,836, about 20% of the world’s population, one in five people in the planet are Chinese nationals.

Now and for the next twenty years, 250 millions of peasants are to move to the cities – existing ones or brand new ones like Ordos, the one featured in this film. There, as some of the characters in the documentary state, they are to become “more civilized.”

A must-see film if you want to experience one of the many Chinese dreams, already set into motion.

“The Chinese Government plans to move, an estimated 250 million rural people to new cities across the country, over the next 20 years.
If successful, the plan will represent the largest migration of people in the history of the world.”
– the film’s website –