Ash is Purest White
Chinese director Jia Zhangke is seen as one of the foremost chroniclers of present-day China, a country marked in recent decades by enormous economic growth with all the changes it entails. Prosperity has increased, but these developments have a big downside, as Jia shows in films as Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and A Touch of Sin. Likewise in his love drama Ash is Purest White, that tells a story spanning sixteen years, enabling Jia to show a changing China. In all these films, Jia's muse and wife Zhao Tao plays a leading role.
2001 in north-western China: A young dancer named Qiao (Zhao) lives in a mining town. She is in love with local crime boss Bin. After having rescued him from an ambush, she ends up in jail for five years. When she is free again, she visits him hoping to pick up her old life again. But is this still possible?