Watch Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue at the Belcourt

For almost three decades, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has studied and depicted the radical transformations his home country has undergone with emotional tenderness and investigative thoroughness. His most recent films, Ash Is Purest White and Mountains May Depart, take place over decades and use genre tropes of the action movie and melodrama to capture the vast historical sweep of a changing society. His latest film, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, also looks at decades of transformation, but on a much more micro scale: The documentary sees Jia returning to his hometown, Shanxi, for a literary festival, celebrating authors born in the region who made their names in bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. It’s a homecoming for all parties involved, and as Jia does so eloquently in both fiction and nonfiction, the bittersweet event is a lens through which to explore the tension between the rapid onset of industrialization and the pastoral roots of rural China. June 12-15, at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. NADINE SMITH