<em>Ash Is Purest White </em>Is a Personal Story Told on an Epic Scale

The director Jia Zhangke filmed some of the first shots of in his home province of Shanxi, China, using the grainiest of digital video. The footage is nondescript—it just captures local folk on a bus—but it’s a pointed jolt of authenticity that helps set the stage for a decades-spanning drama of love and betrayal in a drastically changing country. Jia, whose stark, sometimes unflattering realism has led to repeated, possesses an unparalleled skill for creating a tangible sense of time and place to anchor his sweeping stories.