Starring: Huang Lu, Yang Youan, Zhang Yuling, He Yunle
Director: Li Yang
Category: IIB (Putonghua)
Stark, grim, and utterly engrossing, Blind Mountain sheds light on one of the darkest corners of Chinese society, and does so with such skill that it's sometimes hard to believe it's a movie and not reality.
The kidnapping and selling of women into slave-like marriages in China's remote interior has been the subject of many newspaper exposes, but rarely has the problem been expressed as forcefully as in director-writer-producer Li Yang's portrait of one woman and the vivid recreation of the hell in which she is trapped.
'Hell' isn't the word that comes to mind as the camera of Jong Lin (Eat Drink Man Woman) surveys the beautiful autumn scenery of deepest Shaanxi province, but it's a prison to Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu), a naive university graduate whose status is abruptly reduced to little more than baby machine for an impoverished peasant family.
The delineation of Bai and her world is done with a minimum of dialogue and the director eschews such crutches as voice-over narration and a melodramatic score.