Ash Is Purest White 2018

Jianghu er nv

Directed by Jia Zhang-ke

The transfixing Zhao Tao plays a tough, resilient woman in love with a small-time hoodlum in Jia Zhang-ke’s epic gangland romance, set against China’s relentless modernisation in the 21st century.

China In Mandarin with English subtitles
141 minutes DCP
R13
Violence

Director/Screenplay

Producer

Ichiyama Shozo

Photography

Eric Gautier

Editors

Matthieu Laclau
,
Lin Xudong

Production designer

Liu Weixin

Music

Lim Giong

With

Zhao Tao (Qiao)
,
Liao Fan (Bin)
,
Xu Zheng
,
Casper Liang
,
Feng Xiaogang
,
Diao Yinan
,
Zhang Yibai
,
Ding Jiali
,
Zhang Yi
,
Dong Zijian

Festivals

Cannes (In Competition) 2018

Jia Zhang-ke, China’s pre-eminent contemporary filmmaker – and veteran poet of modern life in flux – continues his blessed run with this blazing jianghu drama starring his faithful partner and leading lady, Zhao Tao, a force to be reckoned with.

“A beautiful marriage of the political and the personal... Ash Is Purest White subtly distills nearly two decades of gradual social change into the story of a small-town gangster and his moll. The movie opens in 2001, in the northern village of Datong, where Guo Bin (Liao Fan), a member of the jianghu underworld, runs a mahjong parlor… But from the start, it’s Bin’s girlfriend, Qiao (Zhao Tao), who magnetizes the camera’s attention… A fiercely devoted partner to Bin, she more than holds her own in this masculine enclave, and her own belief in the brotherly codes of the jianghu, a commitment referenced by the title, runs startlingly deep.

When Bin is attacked by local thugs, it is Qiao who fatefully intervenes and pays the steepest price. From there, the film undergoes a series of thrilling narrative reversals but always keeps Qiao at the fore, grounding its portrait of long-term social and technological flux with the kind of gutsy, lovelorn heroine who would be right at home in a 1940s Hollywood melodrama…

In its swirl of violence and emotion… [Jia’s film] is fierce, gripping, emotionally generous and surprisingly funny... Meanwhile, even those accustomed to seeing Zhao in Jia’s movies… might be taken aback by the depths of her acting here… with the richest, most subtly complex performance she’s given to date.” — Justin Chang, LA Times