The Black Cannon Incident

The engineer Zhao Shuxin loses one of his chess pieces, the black cannon, while away on business. He sends a telegram to the hotel: black cannon missing. Somebody reading the telegram takes it for a coded message. An investigation is opened into Zhao, he is removed from his job as a translator, and he is never told why. Huang Jianxin's first film is a black comedy aimed at bureaucracy and suspicion in the China of the 1980s. The party meetings take place in a stark white room beneath an enormous clock, and that design is what the film is most talked about for. The telling makes nobody ill-intentioned; everyone believes they are doing the right thing from where they stand, and the result arrives at absurdity.