In the first and third acts of "Still Life" we follow labourer Han, who is searching for his runaway wife and daughter, and in the middle section we follow middle-class Hong as she looks for her lost husband. Set in the old village of Fengjie, a small town on the Yangtze River slowly being destroyed to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project, the film portrays the lot of ordinary people, predominantly migrant labourers, lost in an ever changing world. Superb use of photography helps make director Zhang Ke Jia both the primary poet and the scribe of China's chaotic transformation. A masterpiece.