A FOOL | 一個勺子 (China, 2014)
Directed by: Chen Jianbin
Starring: Chen Jianbin, Wang Xuebing, Jin Shijia

In his directorial debut, actor Chen Jianbin walks in the footsteps of A Touch of Sin, No Man’s Land, and Black Coal, Thin Ice with this hard-edged Mainland noir in which kindness and cruelty, madness and reason, greed and decency all struggle for dominance, and the fool might not turn out to be who you expect. The hook here is Chen’s amazing performance as the simple, crude Latioazi, a goat farmer with a son serving a prison sentence. A mentally handicapped young man follows him home one day and enters his life, setting off a chain of events that exposes China’s class divide in all its rawness as his random act of reluctant kindness opens the floodgates to a parade of strangers and grifters all intent on draining him of what little he has to his name.