Login
More than any of his contemporaries, Jia Zhank-ke has masterfully mirrored modern China in all its complex shades through all of his films. His latest work blends love, tragedy and a hard-boiled crime story in a captivating story about the country's embrace of capitalism. We first meet Qiao in 2001, when the financial crisis has set in. She is the girlfriend of the gangster Bin, but when she gets involved in a fight to save him, she ends up in prison. Five years later, when she is released, everything she knows has changed: her boyfriend, her friends, her entire country is unrecognisable. The film is captivatingly told, beautifully filmed and has a melancholy story that constantly surprises us. But its core is a diagnosis of a country and its people, the price that those who survive have to pay for change, and what they lose in the process.