Set in Fenyang, Jia’s hometown in China’s Shanxi province, Xiao Wu tells the story of its name­sake, a pickpocket who struggles to gain a foothold in a rapidly modernizing world. While the gang members with whom he grew up have found fortune as entrepreneurs in the new marketplace, Xiao Wu (Wang Hongwei) sticks to his old trade and gradually finds himself deserted by his friends, family, and love interest. A master of mise-en-scène, Jia used a handheld 16mm camera to follow Xiao Wu’s sad, diminutive figure through dusty streets and ragged alleyways. While the community’s traditional way of life is still in evidence, ubiquitous building demolitions and cultural imports suggest the imminent arrival of a new, alienating world. Filmed on location and with nonprofessional actors, the movie evokes a realism previously little seen in Chinese cinema. By telling the story of one tragic hero, this deeply felt picture brings to the fore the experience of the millions left behind by the country’s monumental leap forward.

Since this independently produced debut feature, Jia has created an unparalleled body of work telling powerful tales of a society transforming at breakneck speed. His perceptive attention to fleeting sights, sounds, and emotions as well as changing relations between people makes him an especially penetrating chronicler of contemporary Chinese life.

In this film a streetwise youth and petty criminal named Xiao Wu navigates the shattered neighborhoods of the remote provincial town Fenyang without a moral compass. Alienated from his increasingly entrepreneurial criminal colleagues, at odds with the police and his family, and shaken by the fleeting tenderness of a karaoke-bar hostess, his defenses are stripped away until he is forced to face the emptiness of his existence.

Authentically performed by an amateur cast, this debut feature by independent filmmaker Jia begins as gritty social realism but gradually develops into a piercing character study and cultural critique set in the incisively documented landscape of contemporary China. The film dramatizes the festering influence of the black-market corruption that, it suggests, has spread through the whole of Chinese society. Ultimately, Jia goes beyond realism to achieve an existential and spiritual quality that may be compared to that of the work of French director Robert Bresson.