The Day the Sun Turned Cold

Yim Ho's sober, engrossing and finely observed film is based on actual events in China, but it's not an exercise in docu-drama. A young man goes to the police in Changchun to confide his fear that his mother murdered his father in their village home ten years earlier; the cops don't take him too seriously, but his persistence forces them to launch an investigation. The core issue, though, is not whether or not murder was done, but the love/hate relationship between a mother and son, and casting of the extraordinary Mongolian actress Siqin Gaowa as the mother gives full play to the Oedipal implications. The mix of realist detail and psychological insight takes the film way beyond the limitations of traditional Chinese melodrama.