Screening – Black Coal, Thin Ice

The Smithsonian's Museum of Asian Art presents a screening of Diao Yinan's film "Black Coal, Thin Ice" about an ex-cop who-five years after a botched arrest for a grisly murder-stumbles back onto his old case. Director Yinan casts Fargo-like noir compulsion and doom in the wintry coal-belt of northern China. Here, danger slow burns beneath the icy frost, and whodunit becomes a phenomenological question as perplexing as a show of fireworks in bright daylight

After a botched arrest in a grisly serial murder case, small-town detective Zhang Zili is suspended from the force, taking a job as a security guard at a coal factory. Five years later, another series of mysteriously similar murders takes place, and Zhang recruits his former partner to finish their investigation. His sleuthing soon leads to a local laundromat proprietor named Wu Zhizhen, whose soft-spoken demeanor and enigmatic aura are compelling to Zhang despite her mysterious connection to the deaths.

Part film noir, part social realist portrait of industrial city life in Northern China, Diao Yinan’s atmospheric Black Coal, Thin Ice is a moody, quietly powerful thriller staged against the quotidian lives of a wintry industrial landscape, and winner of the top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.