An epic that portrays the violence, interrogation and social reality of contemporary China.

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Four provinces, four tragic destinies in today’s China: as the revolt rumbles, violent demonstrations take place all over. During a challenging journey across the Middle Kingdom, four people threatened by social misery desperately do all they can to survive: a miner, a seasonal worker, a receptionist and a handyman. Driven by unscrupulous profiteers, they are in the end all involved in violence, even as they realize this will make their existence even more dangerous.

Chinese movies are often entertainment for the masses and Bollywoodesque romances. There’s none of that here: the director of Platform, Jia Zhang Ke, shows in his documentary-like A Touch of Sin the underside of the China endlessly praised for its economic growth. Cruel, merciless and forbidding, contemporary Chinese society is the theatre inhabited by social tragedies that take place every day, where the class struggle has taken on frightening proportions.