THE DAY THE SUN TURNED COLD/TIAN GUO NI ZO (1994)

Hong Kong based writer/director Ho Yim made this consistently involving murder story in the remote Northern regions of the PRC. It’s a tale of deferred justice that begins when a 24 year old man reports his long held suspicions about his mother to the police ten years after his father unexpectedly died. The film jumps back and forth between the current investigation and the events of a decade ago, and though the crime is straightforward and easy to solve (love triangle, ‘nuff said), the lines of familial duty and honorable intentions combine with the unusual tundra-like environment to easily hold our attention. The last scenes between mother & son are rarely caught and this simple film inhabits a larger emotional scale than is at first apparent. A classic example of a movie that’s more than the sum of its parts.