Linenhall screens acclaimed Chinese drama

FASCINATING Fan Liao and Tao Zhao in director Zhangke Jia’s epic drama ‘Ash is Purest White’.

Linenhall Film Club continues its autumn season on Tuesday, October 22, at 8pm with ‘Ash Is The Purest White’, the latest offering from critically acclaimed writer/director Zhang-ke Jia.
Set among the Chinese gangster classes, the film follows Qiao (played by Tao Zhao), the daughter of an old militant, but also a child of the new China, who ends up going to prison to protect her minor gangster boyfriend Bin (Fan Liao). Upon her release five years later, she discovers that he has abandoned her, and seeking revenge, she sets out to track him down.
Jia uses a three-part story, set in three different timeframes, to portray what it means for ordinary people to live through extraordinary epochal social, economic and cultural changes.
‘Ash Is Purest White’ illuminates what it takes to keep love from burning out, and continues Jia Zhang-ke’s body of work as a record of 21st-century China and its warp-speed transformations. Fascinating and beautiful cinema.
Tao Zhao’s performance as Qiao has been applauded by critics. Reviewing the film, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote: “Jia Zhang-ke’s latest is an often glorious drama about how one woman’s journey from self-sacrificial moll to avenging criminal echoes her country’s embrace of capitalism … a complex romantic tragedy from China’s aspirational gangster-classes.”