Xu Xin’s monumental 2010 film, Karamay (above, part 1, with English subtitles), is a meditation on the relationship humans have to the failings of ideology-driven Modernist political projects in our current historical moment. Using long-takes and repetitive framing shot during visits to Xinjiang in 2007, Xu Xin draws out the long duration of trauma and feelings of injustice. With the exception of a minority of Uyghurs and Kazakhs, the majority of Mandarin speakers featured in this award-winning 356-minute film came from elsewhere. Most of the families in the film came to China’s far Northwestern province of Xinjiang in the 1960s to work in the oil fields and protect the Chinese frontier. Trading rural social networks for the future benefits of membership in the industrial proletariat, these parents placed their lives in the hands of the Party. They committed themselves to a national-communist project thousands of miles from their natal homes; they developed skills for coping with displacement; they disciplined their bodies and the bodies of their children as weapons in a war with nature. Out on …