Melnitz Movies, a program of the UCLA Graduate Students Association, presents a free preview of “The Iron Ministry,” a new documentary film by director J.P. Sniadecki, on Friday, Feb. 27, 1-3 p.m. — preceded at noon by a simple lunch — at the James Bridges Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. The screening will be followed with a Q&A with Sniadecki and Robert Chi, UCLA assistant professor of Asian Languages and Cultures.
Sniadecki spent three years filming on Chinese trains to capture the menagerie of nuances and fleeting encounters of this singular experience. This quietly observational, sensory documentary records the intersections of humans and machinery, flesh and metal. The train cars’ accordion-like connectors pull and squash under strain, much like the lives of its passengers. The transitory conversations span a wide variety of subjects, shedding light on the state of Chinese collective consciousness today.
Wrote Jay Weissber in Variety, “Sniadecki offers a broadly impressionistic, sometimes humorous vision of China’s vast railway system.” Indiewire’s Eric Kohn observed, “Chinese society takes on metaphorical dimensions in (this) absorbing doc.”
See a trailer of “The Iron Ministry” here. The event is free, but an RSVP is required.