Zhangke Jia

Slowly, very slowly and deliberately over two and a third hours, writer/director Zhangke Jia’s Ash Is Purest White nonjudgmentally watches as gangster moll Qiao’s world falls apart. Incidentally but significantly, the Chinese environment that provides the backdrop implicitly exposes economic and social deterioration between the 2001 to 2017 years of Qiao’s story: mines closing, workers unemployed, gambling and gangsters pervasive.