An 86-year-old man prowls the proscenium of a crumbling theater, his naked body stretches and bends, illuminated under glaring lights or hidden by shadow, always heaving with the weight of history. This is Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading classical composers, who becomes the passionate narrator of his life, art, and political persecution against the dramatic backdrop of Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Whether emotionally relating the abuse suffered at the hands of the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, describing how he translated personal and historical pain into the furious abstraction of his symphonies, or simply displaying his miraculously persistent flesh, the musician is at once witness to history, grand storyteller, and physical evidence of his own torment. With director Wang Bing’s tirelessly circling, endlessly compassionate camera and the striking use of Wang Xilin’s glorious music, which buffets, buoys, or sometimes drowns out the composer’s words, Man in Black is an overwhelming sensory experience that speaks to the power of creation amidst human deprivation. An Icarus Films release.