About this event
Black Coal, Thin Ice opens with body parts turning up scattered across coal shipments in a freezing northern Chinese industrial town - a case that gets a disgraced ex-cop shot and demoted to security guard. Five years later, when the killings start again, he's drawn back in, and drawn just as dangerously toward Wu, the quiet dry-cleaning worker at the center of both cases. Diao Yinan builds it as a neon-lit, wintry homage to American noir, filtered through a very specific vision of industrial China in decline - closer to Raymond Chandler than to the propulsive, plot-heavy Korean thrillers you may know better. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin, an unusually mainstream honor for a film this bleak and interior, and remains one of the standout entries in China's small but growing run of arthouse crime cinema. Variety called it a bleak but powerful, carefully controlled detective thriller, while David Ehrlich of Little White Lies called it maybe the angriest movie from mainland China since Li Yang's Blind Mountain. Asia Cine-Club: Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014, China) Tuesday, September 22 | Doors: 6PM | Film: 8PM | TicTic, Phnom Penh Free Entry & Popcorn - Arrive early for sofa, bed, or beanbag seating.
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