Educational Media Reviews Online

Behemoth is an artistic surveillance of the negative effects of industrialization in the Republic of China. To stimulate an awareness of the environmental disaster of the exploitation of natural resources, the filmmakers traveled to Inner Mongolia and spent around two years capturing and documenting the production of coal and iron, and the occupational health and safety conditions of miners. Influenced by Dante’s poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy and the interpretation of biblical segments, the documentary is organized into three sections: hell, purgatory, and paradise. In each section, using observational approaches, the filmmakers skillfully offer a powerful visualization of the similarities between Dante’s environments and that of the modern world.

The documentary shows significant attention to the tragedy of miners’ lives in the region, the impact of the polluted environment, and the effects of unsafe working and living conditions on the health of the miners. According to the statistics used in the documentary, “millions of migrant workers suffer from pneumoconiosis in China. Hundreds of thousands have already died from the disease.” There is a very powerful scene in the documentary when the victims and their relatives attempt to protest with posters and portraits of the family members who are the sick or have died in order to seek help from government officials.

Behemoth is a powerful resource for individuals examining the price that human beings pay for industrialization and its negative effects on natural resources, ecology, and health. The film is in Chinese with English subtitles, and is appropriate for public and academic library collections.