A billow of steam from a decrepit locomotive fails to obfuscate its industrial surround – a state owned mining pit in China’s Inner Mongolia. Meanwhile, elder train driver Zhu and his young apprentice, Zhizhong, hide in the train’s mechanical exhalation, enjoying a furtive chicken foot and a sly illegal beer. The steam rises to its corollary, a clouded azure skyline: a momentary symbol of a China dissipating in the boil of economic and cultural flux. Soon, Zhu will respond to the call of his daughter and the promise of retirement, leaving behind the mine’s arduous environ, an ochre reminder of China’s Socialist construction. Zhizhong, dependent upon his elder companion, sees a chance to continue this Confucian connection, and follows Zhu through the warp and weft of China’s variegated landscape. Zhao Ye’s second feature is both beauteous and potent in its contrasts and compliments; whereas a measure of character interiority is withheld – Li Zhizhong’s motivation is wholly interred and Zhang Yi’s cinematography offers a spatial respect through lack of containment. While lending a documentary gravitas to the mining’s realist milieu, it contradicts the straightjacket of Griersonian fidelity to the real, through a series of astonishing visual fillips; whether observing a distant train slow-gracing its industrial trundle beneath a three-quarter frame cyan sky, or following Li Zhizhong playing basketball through the euphoric, hand-held burnish of golden sunlight, the film excites the senses as Zhao Ye’s touching direction observes and respects those ‘mere’ moments that make up life experience. Jalainur is a film of China’s cultural present and its fossilised political history. Whereas Zhizhong dons a Jay Chou mask on his peddled shadowing of Zhu, Zhu’s working day still resounds with echoes of China’s Communist heritage – only for such a temporal stasis to be rent by a simple mobile ring-tone. This is postmodernity calling, where Confucian fidelity to family and work is both attenuated and strengthened by change and status, a world contradictorily remaining the same as it changes. Capturing China caught in the nexus of contemporary Late Capitalism and its Communist heritage, this also echoes the Chinese proverb “Even if I can accompany you for one thousand miles, finally we must bid farewell” – while gently subverting it.