9 / 10
Official trailer
A Touch of Sin is Jia Zhangke’s 2013 Chinese anthology film and among the most committed engagements with contemporary Chinese social conditions in any national cinema.
The film depicts four loosely connected stories of violence in modern China, each based on actual incidents that the director researched through Chinese news reports. Jiang Wu plays a coal miner who responds violently to corruption in his village. Wang Baoqiang plays a migrant worker who takes up armed robbery. Zhao Tao plays a sauna receptionist who kills a violent customer.
Luo Lanshan plays a young factory worker whose situation produces tragedy. Jia wrote the screenplay. Xstream Pictures produced the film, and it was released internationally in 2013. The work won the Best Screenplay award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
This is the angriest film I know of that never raises its voice, and I think it’s Jia’s best work. Every story ends in blood, and every time the blame lands on the town, the boss and the system around the person holding the weapon. That’s exactly where Jia wants it to land, and he earns it.
The film works as anthology drama and as study in the conditions of contemporary Chinese economic development. The work refuses the abstract treatment that Chinese economic transformation typically receives. Each story is based on distinct historical incident.
Each story situates its violence within distinct institutional conditions that produced the situation. The film’s broader argument is that the depicted violence emerges from systemic conditions instead of from individual pathology. The structural design uses the four stories to develop the argument from multiple regional and economic positions.
The Four-Story Structure
The film’s anthology structure organizes four stories across distinct Chinese regional contexts. The first story takes place in a Shanxi mining village. The second story takes place in Chongqing’s migrant labor environment. The third story takes place in a Hubei sauna. The fourth story takes place in a Dongguan electronics factory. The geographic distribution allows the work to engage with multiple aspects of contemporary Chinese economic transformation instead of focusing on single representative location.
The stories are variations on shared underlying conditions instead of unconnected dramatic situations. Each depicts a distinct institutional failure that produces a particular violent response, and the audience accumulates a recognition of those conditions that no single story could provide. The repetition wears me down, and I think that’s the point. By the fourth story I know the shape of the ending and dread it anyway.
For Writers
Anthology structures can develop arguments through accumulated examples that single-narrative structures can’t match. A Touch of Sin uses four stories to develop a shared argument about contemporary Chinese conditions. This applies to fiction with broad argumentative ambition. Consider whether your work benefits from anthology structure or from sustained narrative. Anthology allows breadth at the cost of depth in any single story. Sustained narrative allows depth at the cost of breadth across multiple situations. Match the structural choice to the work’s actual ambitions.
The Historical Sourcing
The film bases each of its four stories on actual incidents that the director researched through Chinese news coverage.
The dramatic decisions come out of research into real situations instead of authorial invention, and it shows in every scene. I find the specificity almost unbearable in places, because nothing plays like a writer’s idea of suffering. These things happened to particular people in particular towns.
The historical sourcing also produces particular political weight.
The depicted incidents aren’t abstract examples of social problems. They occurred in particular locations to particular people who responded in particular ways. The work’s argument about systemic conditions works against documented reality instead of against authorial assertion. The audience encounters dramatic content that the director can defend through reference to documented sources. The approach has acquired increasing value as the documented sources have themselves become subject to varying access in later Chinese media environment.
For Writers
Historical sourcing can produce dramatic specificity that invented narratives can’t match. A Touch of Sin’s four stories all emerge from documented incidents. The specificity strengthens the work’s broader argument. This applies to fiction with social ambition. Consider whether your work benefits from grounding in documented reality. The grounding requires research investment that pure invention doesn’t demand. The investment pays off in specificity that audiences read as authentic engagement with real conditions.
The Visual Approach
The film’s visual approach combines documentary fidelity with controlled stylization.
The cinematography by Yu Lik-wai works in a similar key Jia had developed across previous films. The compositions emphasize particular Chinese architectural and industrial environments. The depicted physical conditions of Chinese contemporary life receive attention that documentary engagement allows. The work also incorporates particular stylistic choices including occasional wuxia-influenced violence depiction that connects contemporary content to classical Chinese cinematic tradition.
The connection to wuxia tradition works as deliberate cultural argument. The film’s title references classical Chinese cinema, and some of the violence is staged with conventions the wuxia films used. The point is that contemporary Chinese violence continues a long historical pattern instead of breaking from it. I think those sequences are the boldest thing Jia does here. A timid director would have kept everything drab and naturalistic, and the film would have lost the sense that these people are living inside a very old story.
For Writers
Visual or stylistic choices can carry argumentative weight that exposition can’t replace. A Touch of Sin connects contemporary content to wuxia tradition through visual choices. The connection makes an argument about historical continuity that exposition would have weakened. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your stylistic choices carry argumentative weight beyond their immediate aesthetic effects. The strongest stylistic decisions often work at multiple levels.
Craft Note
Jia’s structural decision to base each of his four stories on actual incidents required deep research investment that exceeds normal screenplay development. The director consulted Chinese news sources, interviewed witnesses where possible, and visited the actual locations where the incidents occurred. The investment produced dramatic content that the director could defend through reference to documented reality. The resulting film works as both dramatic engagement and as journalistic intervention into Chinese social conditions. The lesson applies to creative work broadly.
Research investment that exceeds standard preparation produces work that audiences read as authoritatively engaged with its subject matter. The investment is often invisible in the completed work but produces detail that audiences notice without consciously identifying its source.
Is A Touch of Sin as good as people say?
A Touch of Sin deserves its 9. The four-story structure builds the argument through accumulated examples no single narrative could supply, the historical sourcing gives it a specificity invention can’t match, and the visual approach turns documentary fidelity into something closer to legend.
The point I hold back is the anthology’s price.
With four stories, none of these people gets as much room as I’d like, and I’d happily have watched a whole film about any one of them. That’s a small complaint against a film this angry and this controlled. If you care about Chinese cinema, about Jia, or about what economic change does to ordinary people, see it.
