REVIEW: 江湖儿女 [Jiang hu er nĂ¼] [Ash Is Purest White] [2018]

Armed men tend to die first. The genesis of Zhangke Jia‘s Jiang hu er nĂ¼ [Ash is Purest White] is intriguing. After thinking about cut scenes from two of his earlier films starring now wife Tao Zhao (Unknown Pleasures and Still Life), he found himself merging her characters into one. He saw this woman having begun in the coal-mining town of Shanxi before eventually making way towards Fengjie as the county worked to flood cities for construction on the Three Gorges Dam. So this latest work becomes a sort of…

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