AllMovie

Shot in 1997 and premiered at Documenta XI in 2002, An Estranged Paradise displays many of Yang's signature motifs — crisp black-and-white 35mm cinematography, storylines that blur contemporaneity with traditional stylistics, homages to/revisions of genre cinema akin to the early work of his influences Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch — while also reflecting his early studies as a painter, notably in a prologue that muses on the traditional methods and subjectivity of Chinese landscape painting.