Jia Zhangke's new film enters, in a certain way, into an interesting dialectic with Blossoms Shanghai, the Wong Kar-wai series which has also just been released, in terms of following the mutations that China has experienced in recent decades by two leading figures of the Asian cinema boom. Wong Kar-wai, the director of Desiring to love, became known for his practice of stylized melodrama that, until now, left historical context in the background. On the contrary, from his first films, Pickpocket (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown pleasures (2002), Jia Zhangke became the great realist innovator of contemporary Chinese cinema, the representative of a new generation that, unlike the previous one, formed by Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, did not look so much towards the country's past as towards the more immediate present in a country of brutal paradigm shift of the socioeconomic model.