Documentary maker’s vision of ravaged, industrial hell in China and his battles with the country’s censors

It is a vision of hell on earth: green hills blasted into black heaps and workers toiling under snarling machinery, dodging hot red sparks and rivers of molten metal.

Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, a medieval tale of a journey to the underworld, Zhao Liang’s latest documentary presents a bleak vision of China’s breakneck industrialisation.

Behemoth won rave reviews at international film festivals, but the director says a ban by Communist officials mean only a handful of people in his home country will see it.

A screening in Beijing this month was a far cry from Venice Film festival’s red carpet, where Zhao waved for photographers in September.

Instead a small audience, largely fellow filmmakers and artists, watched his chronicle of the ripping apart of China’s Inner Mongolia region in the pursuit of economic growth.

Zhao said afterwards that the film’s setting “offered the kind of visual spectacle I was looking for. The environment was just too shocking.”