New film explores China's booming fashion industry

VENICE, Sep 4 (Reuters) The winner of last year's Venice film festival, Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke, is back on the Lido with a documentary exploring China's burgeoning fashion industry and the social changes it reflects.

By looking at the work of young Chinese fashion designer Ma Ke, the director uses clothes and how they are made as a way to describe the impact his country's tumultuous economic development is having on its people.

It is a familiar theme for Jia, who last year scooped the Golden Lion award for best film here with ''Still Life'', a movie about the lives of ordinary people affected by the giant Three Gorges Dam project in China.

''Useless'', screening outside the main competition in Venice, is divided into three parts, taking the viewer on a journey from the squalid garment factories of Guangzhou in the south of China to the catwalks of Paris' glitzy fashion shows.

In Guangzhou, part of an area which has turned into one of the world's top manufacturing regions, row after row of workers labour day and night over sewing machines.

Some of the dresses they make are those designed by Ma Ke, but she is also trying to move away from industrial production and anonymous clothes to produce dresses with a more unique, hand-made feel.

Jia followed her in Paris, where earlier this year she presented the new ''Useless'' line which gives the film its name -- clothes that she covers with dirt to give them a natural, authentic look.

Back in China, though, the director looks at the spread of mass consumerism as young women cram Western luxury designers' shops to buy the ultimate status symbols: a bag by Louis Vuitton or Prada.

The third part of the documentary travels to Jia's native Shanxi province, where small tailors are shutting their booths and going to work in mines instead, driven out of the market by the cheap workforce employed in the clothing factories.

''I didn't know anything about fashion before the film, but through fashion I understood many things about my own country and my country's society,'' Jia told Reuters in an interview after a press screening.

He said he wanted the three acts to show the contradictions of his country and the growing gap between rich and poor fuelled by the economic boom.

The documentary's producer told a news conference he hoped ''Useless'' would be distributed in at least 10 Chinese cities.

''Three hundred films are produced in China (every year) and less than 20 arrive on the market,'' Jia said. ''My film last year reached 20 cities and this was a hit for me.'' REUTERS PY RAI0855