BLIND MOUNTAIN (MANG SHAN) World Cinema

A demographic time bomb haunts China today. Den Xiaoping ‘s One-Child Policy has left too few women available for Chinese men to marry, especially in the less prosperous countryside. Writer/director Li Yang’s film, which received sustained. ovations at Cannes uses this society-wide crisis as the basis for raw and powerful melodrama.

The promise of a decent paying job lures the naive, ingenuous Bai Xuemei (beautifully played by Huang Lu in her screen debut) to a desolate farming village in Northern China. Once there, she discovers he’s been sold into a marriage that is essentially slavery. Her desperate efforts to find help escaping the village and the brutal family holding her captive disclose an ironic pattern of interlocking injustices. Bai’s destiny, including a last minute act of resistance, symbolizes an entire society caught in disorienting crisis of radical change.

Li, whose film BLIND SHAFT captured the agony of China’s unregulated mining industry, establishes himself as his country’s most important social-realist director an Asian counterpart to Ken Loach.