Educational Media Reviews Online

Writer-director Chi Zhang’s first film was snatched up by The Global Film Initiative as part of their Global Lens Collection. They are a non-profit film organization founded in 2002 and based in San Francisco and their mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema. The choice to include this film reflects their desire to raise our awareness of a rare and exquisite film that would have most likely otherwise been lost in the vast sea of film festivals. The director clearly has an extraordinary talent for camera placement and composition resulting in exceptionally beautiful shots that linger beyond the initial viewing of this film. The powerful start sets the tone for the unfolding of the film by setting up the first several shots as a microcosm for the entire piece: they contain no dialogue yet they speak volumes in terms of their beautiful compositions and movement within the frame. Their evocative camera set-ups situate the narrative within the specific landscape of workers in a rural mining town and the eventual unraveling of the story. The visuals are deliberate and haunting and the events and conversations precise. The film is lean, not padded with irrelevant information, and so each line of dialogue, each camera movement is a carefully planned and necessary piece of the whole.

The story revolves around a family of three. The single father has been working in the mines for years after his wife’s family took her away; the attractive young daughter is forced into an arranged marriage after being spurned by her boyfriend following the accusation of an affair with her manager; the son dreams of a career as a pop singer but is duped by a swindler and ends up having to work in the mines. The three stories are told consecutively but with each new emphasis more is revealed about the others. The DVD comes with a DVD-ROM discussion guide. This means that the disc needs to be placed in a computer for this feature to be accessed. This material would be valuable at a high school or freshman college level. The film is in Mandarin with English subtitles and is very highly recommended. It should become part of the canon for Chinese film studies.