Up the Yangtze was made by Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang, whose direction focuses on two young people, the sixteen year-old "Cindy" Shui Yu and the nineteen year-old "Jerry" Bo Yu Chen. They both go to work on the tourist riverboats that roam up the Yangtze River. Jerry is arrogant and loves money and the movie tends to keep a bit of distance from him. But Cindy's tale is heartbreaking. She comes from a very poor family that lives off the land on the side of the river. Forced to move because of flooding caused by the Three Gorges project, the family is unable to send Cindy to school. She must make money instead. On her first day of washing dishes aboard a boat, she bursts into tears. American tourists parade through the boat, making brain-dead comments about how China is more "modern" than they thought. This is a sad film to be sure, but highly accomplished and very effective. I haven't yet decided on my favorite festival documentary, but it's a top contender.

Opening this Friday in the Bay Area, Still Life confirms Jia's status as one of the best filmmakers in the world. Its two separate protagonists arrive in one soon-to-be-flooded town. A miner (Han Sanming) travels downriver to find his wife and daughter, neither of whom he has seen in 16 years. A nurse (Zhao Tao) looks for her husband. These characters never meet on screen, though they share certain visual and story parallels. They both wander around the bizarre landscape full of half-demolished buildings. Every shot contains some kind of visual conflict: for example, one group of workers pounding away at a chunk of rubble while another masked and suited group comes by spraying some kind of chemical on the grounds.

Money is crucial to Still Life. Characters use etchings on bills to show images of their hometowns and a magician converts Yuan to euros. (Chow Yun-fat is also seen on TV lighting a cigarette with cash in a clip from John Woo's 1987 A Better Tomorrow.) Jia's tone is mysterious and often funny -- as when a UFO suddenly takes off and flies through the air! He's made a film to revel in. Still Life won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2006 and it has a good shot of being the best film to get a theatrical release in SF this year.

Still Life: The horrors and heartbreaks of mass displacement -- and UFOs!

Both Still Life and Up the Yangtze feel like a slap in the face in the great battle between man and nature. In each case, the filmmakers give the audience credit for choosing sides. The great Russian director Alexander Sokurov does the same with his excellent new Alexandra, although his story is set miles and miles from the Yangtze. It begins with an almost laughable scenario: an elderly woman (opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya) travels to the front lines to visit her grandson, an army captain, Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), with the Russian army during the occupation of Chechnya. She totters around, struggling to climb in and out of trains and tanks and barracks. Denis and Alexandra have only a few scenes together, but those moments recall the deeply moving relationship depicted in Sokurov's masterpiece Mother and Son (1997), full of touching, cradling, and honest conversation. ("You're so beautiful," the grandson says when she unbraids her brittle, gray hair.)

Despite their talks, however, this mother and son never seem to get any closer, and Denis is always running off for missions. Alexandra spends time wandering around the camp, and we see Sokurov's obsession with (shirtless) men bonding and working under tight conditions. The men treat Alexandra with queenly dignity or like a child, and she responds in kind. Her breakthrough comes when she visits a nearby market and befriends a local saleslady; though they are from different regions, their age places them far above and away from any military conflict. Most of all, Sokurov uses the film's unique situation to show the vast differences between the old and the young, and the benefits and faults of both. Alexandra has a look that is similar to his previous films, it still has a vivid texture, but one that's less painterly and harder. We can practically taste the film's cigarettes and dust.

In contrast to Still Life, Lance Hammer's Ballast is one of my least favorite films this year. For some reason, this film won a Best Director and Best Cinematography awards at Sundance, but it's really just Indie Filmmaking 101; the hand-held shaky-cam work and jump cutting go back to Breathless (1959) and a million other derivative films in the interim. Writer-director Hammer tells a story about a broken black family in Mississippi; a man commits suicide and his surviving twin brother Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.) finds himself dealing with his angry sister-in-law Marlee (Tarra Riggs) and nephew James (Jim Myron Ross), the latter of which has become involved with local drug dealers. Hammer apparently wishes to show the inaction of grief, but the best he can do is jiggle his camera around while Lawrence sits on his bed and stares out the window. The impatient cutting and pacing lurches in service of the story: the bereaved family members, practically strangers to each other, eventually help each other learn to loosen up and live again. (It's a favorite theme of nearly every Hollywood film.)

An image from Lance Hammer's Ballast.

Hammer has clearly been inspired by Charles Burnett's masterpiece Killer of Sheep (1977) and David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000), but has failed to grasp those film's tone or artistry, nor their willingness to pause, look around and occasionally see beyond a rudimentary plot.