The Jia Zhangke retrospective will launch on Sunday 8 March with a members' event featuring spicy cocktails and an academic intro by Maurizio Marinelli (UCL). You can find tickets for this here.
Ash Is Purest White is Jia Zhangke’s only explicit gangster film, although his works consistently return to jianghu as a social condition, an informal ethical order shaped by loyalty, obligation, violence, and survival amid historical change. Deeply influenced by Hong Kong genre cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, the film can be seen as a grounded, realist response to the heroic bloodshed tradition epitomized by John Woo's The Killer, translating its codes of loyalty and jianghu ethics into the lived realities of post-reform China.
Spanning more than fifteen years, the film views a changing China through the perspective of a pair of lovers. It follows Qiao, a woman from Datong, and Bin, a local underworld figure, whose rise and gradual disappearance mirror the shifting structures of power and belonging. Performed by Jia’s muse Zhao Tao, Qiao embodies a cool, self-possessed presence that recalls Pulp Fiction’s Mia Wallace, marked by autonomy, resilience, and moral resolve. After a fight breaks out between rival gangs, an act of loyalty irrevocably alters the course of her life…
