Four Stars for Ghost Town at MoMA

At Time Out New York, David Fear awards the Lantern Films production Ghost Town four stars as it begins its one-week run at MoMa:

An elderly preacher and his son, who’s followed in Dad’s pulpit-thumping footsteps, argue over whether music is immoral. A truck driver in his twenties hauls his meager loads, taking what little work he can. A pig farmer, who’s devolved into a full-blown alcoholic, stumbles drunkenly around town. (Even his geriatric mother declares that he’s useless. Ouch.) A preteen boy forages in the woods for food like a feral animal; later, he takes part in a ritualistic ceremony to “drive away the ghosts.”

These are the citizens we meet in Zhao Dayong’s extraordinary documentary on life in the rural village of Zhiziluo, nestled at the foot of the mountains in China’s southwestern Yunnan province.