The World's Largest Studio
2007 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Charlie Moretti, Matt Clarke
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
This documentary tours Hengdian World Studios in China, a vast complex of period shooting sites, a full-scale Forbidden City replica, an acting school, and a tourist attraction where dozens of films and dramas are made each year.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc about a theme park masquerading as cinema infrastructure—it's almost too on-the-nose about the death of authenticity, which makes it either brilliant or toothless depending on whether the filmmakers knew what they were doing.
Moretti and Clarke construct a formally rigorous ethnographic essay that situates itself squarely in the lineage of cinema-studies documentaries; the Forbidden City replica becomes a perfectly legible metaphor for cinema's relationship to artifice and labor, executed with restrained elegance.
The choice to treat the studio's scale not as spectacle but as a deadpan fact—letting the camera linger on the tourists and extras as the real subject—transforms what could've been a travel doc into something unexpectedly melancholic about work and desire.