Jia Zhangke's latest movie spotlights acts of rage of frustrated Chinese

Specifically, Mr. Jia discovered the world of Twitter-like microblogs, which many Chinese have been reading in recent years to get the unvarnished daily news and opinions that are all but absent from the state-run news media. He was bombarded with news from all corners of China, much of it tied to the crimes of corrupt officials or businesspeople: rape, land seizures, industrial pollution. In many of those cases, he said, frustrated ordinary Chinese had been provoked to commit acts of bloodshed.

“I slowly began to see the problem of individual violence in society,” the soft-spoken Mr. Jia, 43, said one recent afternoon in his office in northwest Beijing. “There are many tragedies or societal problems in which people in the end rebel, resulting in a very big tragedy. So I began to pay more and more attention to this problem, because, frankly speaking, I feel like Chinese people do not really understand the problem of violence because society has never had a widespread discussion of the problem.”

Mr. Jia decided to put the dynastic epic aside and make a different kind of action film, one more in line with his body of work. Called “A Touch of Sin,” the work had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the prize for best screenplay, and is showing this fall at various film festivals, including in New York this month. It is tentatively scheduled to open in China in November.