Harbouring inside this theatre of ruin – of crumbling memory, of withering age – reside the silent voices of a generation, of an industry teetering on the brink of abandonment. Returning for the first time in seven years, the aged workers enter the Lien Fu garment factory for a staged session of work, as if returning to inhabit their mortal vessels once again for one last time, for one last farewell. There is little jubilation in their visit to the “Factory”; this is a solemn affair, one which Chen Chieh-jen captures with powerful sincerity and hypnotic allure.

Factory is screening at Taiwan Film Festival UK

In its deafening silence, the anxiety of an uncertain future screams in futile agony; for among the towering pyres of chairs and tables awaiting engulfment are the workers who once spent their prime hours of the day within these walls at their sewing machines. Laid off without severance or a pension plan, they reappear as a ghostly presence, tending to their instruments of work once again, only this time their weathered faces pained with forlorn expressions; forlorn exhaustion replaces the exuberance of employment as these women slump over their stations, their in situ bodies feel almost like tombstones. Haunting this dilapidated building are two women holding out a jacket, consistently looking one way to a forgotten past and the other to a grim present; their stone-faced visage tell more than words ever could.

A haunting protest to the unlawful nature in which these women and many more like them were relieved of their duties in the name of cheaper labour costs overseas, “Factory” lingers on the stillness of the void this industrious inactivity has left behind; it is a void nobody seems to want to symbolically stare in to for any great length of time. We as an audience however, cannot help but remain transfixed as the darkness of this void spreads, as the camera slowly zooms into the pitch-black of the jacket, of an ill-lit hallway; even the rain outside helps disconnect us from the outside world. Theirs is a global plight, one which labourers the world over will seldom struggle to relate to. It is uneasy yet dreamlike, poetic but incredibly real.

Chen’s cinematographic eye helps swallow this meticulous performance whole, panning and tracking its way through and across his stage with unwavering prowess. But it is his attention to the stillness, to the minutiae which flickers throughout his work and here it is conflagrative; the individual hairs of “Factory”’s women move in the breeze, every individual fibre of fabric stands out, every wrinkle a crisp reminder of the passage of temporal and physical decline since the days of the propaganda footage interspliced throughout. The cinematic centrepiece of one worker struggling to rethread her needle serves as a painful reminder of this too, perhaps more so; it strikes with fervent poignancy and, much like the performance as a whole, is captured with inescapable delicacy.

Such is Chen’s craft, but here on “Factory” it renders the audience trapped in an ethereal microcosm ravaged by time and the blatant disregard for consequence. Matched only by the piece’s profundity and an immaculate production design, Chen’s moving photography is in a world of its own here, his glacial movements allow for every breath to be inhaled, for every fleeting moment to be absorbed, for its message to ripple from beyond the confines of the ruinous architecture – it seems to be the only thing destined to leave this space.