by SARAH ROWLAND

If you go through the front gates of Beijing's World Park, you can read the neon promise, "Give us a day and we'll show you the world." But if you use the back door entrance through Jia Zhangke's eyes, you can see the cost of globalization on the employees who run the theme park. The Chinese director explores their vacuous existence in The World, a movie about a showgirl named Tao (Zhao Tao) who loses a chunk of herself every day that she works in the outdoor museum of replicated tourist traps (e.g. an Eiffel Tower a third of the size, a miniature London Bridge and a scaled down Taj Mahal).

Like Zhangke's three previous feature films, The World focuses on the culture shock that rural people face in the age of ever-expanding urbanization. Having migrated to the nation's capital from a small town in the Shanxi province 12 years ago, he can relate to his film's characters, who are being destroyed both physically and psychologically in the cogs of big city life.

"In the countryside, people live in very intense family relations," says Zhangke, who's calling from Paris. "So leaving those traditions was very traumatic for me. I found myself suddenly living in solitude and quickly turning into an individual."

The biggest shock for him, however, was the side effects of a newly introduced market-based economy.

"You can see how superficially China is developing, especially the way young people consume the latest products," says the Asian auteur. "But this materialism is not a real modernization. I would rather see a modernization of the people, of the mind, in the literature and the culture."

In the film, Zhangke conveys these concerns through several subplots: Tao's boyfriend Taisheng is having an affair with a married woman who oversees a sweatshop that produces designer knock-offs. Taisheng's friend Little Sister works on a construction site under dangerous conditions so he can earn overtime. And Tao herself jingles with useless trinkets tied to her jacket and seems to prefer cell messaging to human contact.

As well as being a critically acclaimed cinematic achievement for the filmmaker, The World is his first feature approved by the Chinese film bureau. For eight years, on his previous films, he worked under stressful circumstances, never knowing if he would be busted for shooting without a permit.

"The price I paid was making three films that can't be seen in my own country," he says. "But at the time, I couldn't afford to be sentimental about it. I had to keep going forward and I wasn't alone. Myself and other independent filmmakers in China throughout the '90s were a collective force with one aim: that is to present our public with good films."

Although the aforementioned directors who played a big part in wearing down the censorship system are commonly referred to as the "sixth generation" of Beijing filmmakers, Zhangke has another way of describing their relationship.

"To use a Chinese political term, we are comrades," he says with a laugh, before adding, "together we cannot be stopped."

The World opens at Cinéma du Parc, Friday, Mar. 18

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