Capturing the malaise of Chinese society at the tail end of the 20th century, Jia Zhang-ke’s restored feature debut is ripe for re-examination.

Aimless young man Xiao Wu is a petty thief, haunting the public spaces of the far-flung town of Fenyang to procure strangers’ wallets – a livelihood that mirrors the systemic corruption of the society around him on a micro scale. A path to a different life offers itself first through a love affair with a callgirl, then through a visit home to his socially respectable family. But he will quickly discover just how much room this milieu has for fringe dwellers like him.

Recently restored in 4K and screened at the 2020 Berlinale, the first full-length feature film by Jia Zhang-ke (Ash Is Purest White, MIFF 2018; A Touch of Sin, MIFF 2013) is an acidic portrait of rural China in the late 1990s. Planting the seeds for the director’s critically acclaimed subsequent visions of cultural alienation, Pickpocket also nods to those left behind by economic development, both then and over the course of the two decades since.

“Jia’s restrained yet fierce X-ray of the ills of modern China also evokes a calm, intimate compassion for its struggling survivors.” – The New Yorker

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Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with MK2 and in collaboration with Jia Zhang-ke. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.