Unknown Pleasures

Unknown Pleasures (Chinese: 任逍遥 ; pinyin: Rèn xiāo yáo ; lit. 'Free from all constraints') is a 2002 Chinese film directed by Jia Zhangke, starring Wu Qiong, Zhao Weiwei and Zhao Tao as three disaffected youths living in Datong in 2001, part of the new "Birth Control" generation. Fed on a steady diet of popular culture, both Western and Chinese, the characters of Unknown Pleasures represent a new breed in the People's Republic of China, one detached from reality through the screen of media and the internet.

The film was a co-production of four countries: Japan's Office Kitano and T-Mark, China's Hu Tong Communications, France's Lumen Films, and South Korea's E-Pictures.[1] It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival[2] but would eventually lose to director Roman Polanski's Holocaust film, The Pianist.[3]

Unknown Pleasures is Jia's third feature film after 1997's Xiao Wu and 2000s Platform, and it is sometimes considered the final film of an informal trilogy on a modern China in transition.[4] The film also marked Jia's last production outside of the Chinese studio system. With 2004's The World, Jia would work with the approval of the state film bureaucrats (SARFT).[5]