Slant magazine has listed the Lantern Films production Ghost Town as No. 21 on its list of the top 100 films released to the screen in 2010. The magazine writes:
21. Ghost Town. An essential addition to the Chinese cinematic project of documenting the collateral damage of the country’s massive economic transformations, Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town chronicles a dusty southwest village utterly left behind by the nation’s shifting focus toward its coastal-based economy. While a statue of Mao in the town square recalls the questionable legacy of the country’s past, Zhao’s tripartite doc takes in an estranged father-son pair of Christian priests, an alcoholic ditched by his wife and child and a 12-year-old kid forced to fend for himself after being left behind by his parents. Abandonment is the watchword here, as the country’s neglect of its former provincial centers is mirrored by the rifts between family members and between contemporary life and ancient tradition that play out daily on the town’s streets, a set of circumstances that Zhao captures in striking digital imagery, most memorably in a fiery ghost-exorcism ritual led by the preteen that speaks eloquently to the boy’s will to overcome the privations brought about by his inherited past.
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