With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.

With Still Life, Jia reportedly has gone back to indie filmmaking. Something about his big "studio" debut The World (2005) apparently displeased him, even though to my eyes it's his greatest film. No matter: if you were to show Jia's films to a newcomer and ask him to determine which ones were indie and which ones were studio, he'd be hard-pressed to decide. Certainly the sprawling epic Platform (2000) feels like a "big" film, even though it's comprised mainly of small moments. They all have the stamp of a commanding filmmaker regardless of budget. My very first impression of Still Life was that it felt like an epilogue from some other film, a smaller version of something bigger, and that it was the least of his works. But I find that the film won't disappear so easily. The more I think about it, the more I've been able to make certain visual and thematic connections. It's more fully realized and accomplished than it first appears.

Still Life takes place in and around Fengjie, one of the flooded cities that's part of the massive Three Gorges Dam project. The flooding has displaced or will displace anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million people. (See the documentaries Manufactured Landscapes and Up the Yangtze for more info.) The film opens with a slow pan over passengers riding on a boat on the Yangtze; many seem to be whiling away the time, unconcerned with anything but their daily routines. A miner (Han Sanming) has traveled downriver to find his wife and daughter, neither of whom he has seen in 16 years. And a nurse (Zhao Tao) looks for her husband. Neither of these characters ever meets onscreen, though they share certain visual and story parallels.

They each wander around the bizarre landscape, full of half-demolished buildings and rising floodwaters. Jia is one of the few directors who uses space as a primary character in his films. (Still Life is beautifully, crisply shot on digital video.) In one scene, a man and a woman argue while a large hole gapes in the floor in front of them, and a beautiful view can be seen behind them over a broken wall. This rubble, half-standing, half-fallen, constitutes Jia's view and overall mood. Every shot contains some kind of visual conflict, such as workers pounding away at chunks of wreckage while other workers wearing masks and suits (looking like spacemen) come by spraying some kind of chemical on the grounds. Money is also crucial to the film. 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 A Better Tomorrow.) This world is strikingly different from the amusement park trappings of The World, and its ability to stave off reality in favor of a miniaturized, controlled, happy-faced version.

Making connections across the span of the movie can work like a puzzle, like our miner and nurse gazing across the river from opposite sides, yet unable to see each other. If you can remember an image from 45 minutes earlier, you can connect it to something going on now. But individual scenes work beautifully as well: when the nurse spends several long moments bandaging an injured worker, the scene comes to end when an electrical box behind them suddenly dies in a shower of sparks. In another scene, a structure in the background suddenly takes off like a rocket ship (!) and the final shot rests on a tightrope walker (a tidy little metaphor). Indeed, it's a mistake to look at Jia's films as somber recordings of Chinese history and cultural displacement; he's definitely working through an ironic grin. He's an observer, but he has also taken up residence inside his filmic worlds.