When power shifts from one hand to another, changes don’t spread uniformly across the country, especially in a country as large as China. It’s a tough divide, not just between small towns far away from the capital, but also between generations, between adults who have grown up under a certain regime and kids who want to find something new. This is what happened at the center of Platform– after the Cultural Revolution, the four teenagers of the Fenyang Peasant Culture Group went from being limited only to certain Maoist-approved works to the music of the rest of the world. While the major shift seems to evoke hope to some of the teens, writer-director Jia Zhangke's Zhantai depicts their slow-paced tragedy through key moments that reveal how, for many youth, that desire for change mostly left many of them lost and naive.

The way everyone is framed a bit far away, never with any close-ups, but always meticulously framed.