User Reviews

The story is set in the nineties, but the situation has probably not changed much. The male/female ratio in China, especially in the countryside, is getting more and more unbalanced. Female foetuses are aborted, female babies are killed. Result: all those men, without a women to take for a wife and to have sons with. This paradox was clearly illustrated in the film, where a remote mountain village abducts women to marry its single men, while at the same time it is shown that a female newborn has been drowned. The women behind me in the theatre started commenting very indignantly about this: if they lack so many women, why kill female babies? The film makes a very strong statement: the woman is raped by the would-be husband with the assistance of his parents; the whole village, including the government officials, is collaborating to prevent the abducted women from escaping. I can imagine that the Chinese authorities are not very happy with the way its cadres are depicted, nor with the inability of the authorities to deal with the problem.

While the film tells a harsh and cruel story in a very realistic way, it is also beautifully shot in a beautiful mountain area in Shanxi and it is well acted. I don't know if this film will be widely seen in China, but I hope it will be seen at least by the authorities who have the power to change these things. The very strong preference for male offspring is based on deep-rooted traditions: sons are responsible for funeral rites and ancestor worship, and sons have to take care of the parents in the absence of a social security system. The latter is now slowly being put in place in the cities, but is still not in place in the countryside. Also in the cities, more and more women are having well paid jobs and are thus able of taking care of their parents. Still, China is huge, and the catching up that the countryside will need to do will require a lot of time.

I noted that this film was set in the 1990's and that the main character had graduated from college. If so, how dense did she have to be to keep on giving letters to the postman and never get any replies? This point was made before but what got me was her reaction to her father during the rescue mission when she said it took him a long time to come and get her. This question indicated that she thought that only the last one she had given to the postman had been given to her "husband", which to me meant she was pretty but very dense. I did not buy into the stopping of the bus either and dragging her off. I have ridden buses in China and they don't stop just like that. I think there was an error in the photography in that I could see two dishes in the distance when there weren't any of those around in the early 1990's. Finally, the Chinese people in general obey the police, but here we have the police being harangued and even threatened by the villagers. Did it not occur to the leader that more police would show up should anything happen to the two who came with her father?

Through the undue course of "Mang Shan", Xumei(Lu Huang) makes so many wrong moves in her numerous endeavors to flee her agrarian confines, a western audience may start to wonder about the filmmaker's disposition towards women. College-educated and urban, nevertheless, Xumei allows herself to be outsmarted by these unschooled peasants with a naivety that strains the film's credibility as a feminist treatise, or an anti-communist manifesto. Masquerading as scouts for a pharmaceutical company, the young woman and her older male colleague who sells the cash-strapped college grad to the indigent farming family, inspires Decheng to ask Xumei, "How could you have believed those guys?" Since the seemingly kind schoolteacher turns out to be complicit towards the girl's forced detainment, this inquiry can be construed as a subtle mocking of his intellectual superior, whom he envies, having flunked his college entrance exams after graduation. This provincialism man; at one point, confesses to Xumei that he had never seen a train. In spite of her vaunted worldliness, in spite of her time spent on trains, however, this modern woman finds herself on equal terms with the rustic man; the very outcome that Mao Tse Tsung envisioned when he implemented his Great Leap Forward plan onto Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. Over and over again, Xumei exhibits a counter-intuitive nature about her desperate predicament that's so alarmingly pronounced, questions about the filmmaker's attitudes towards women and higher-education need to be raised.

For starters, the dawning that everybody within her adopted farming village is aligned against bought women from departing their regimented lives, crosses Xumei's mind with an extended deliberation that borders on mild mental retardation. After all, her own "mother-in-law" participated in the rape preliminaries for that first night she spent with Degui, the rapist, her "husband"; a sure indicator that the social norms of civilization don't apply among these people. Befriending men, if not for the especial purpose of accruing money from sex, lacks the proper psychological motivation, which makes Xumei's friendship with Decheng somewhat unlikely. Given the context, the counterbalancing effects of romantic love plays out like a fallacy, because it suggests that the enslaved woman's bond with the farmer is merely an arranged marriage. Even worse, Xumei hands over letters to the postman without any consciousness of her husband's whereabouts when the exchanges are made. At the very least, she should look over her shoulder, since the correspondences to her father is a prelude for escape. Over time, despite having no indication that the letters had ever reached its destination, Xumei unceasingly acts without prudence by her continuing trust of the civil servant. Finally, a boy that Xumei tutors, sees what we already surmised, that the postman, like the village chief, like the other "handmaids"(echoes of the Margaret Atwood novel abounds), like the schoolteacher, are all in on the conspiracy. It's beyond belief that a college-educated woman could be this dense, but the mortified look on Xumei's face, upon learning the fate of her letters, indicates that she believed her written transmissions were being sent. If escaping on foot proved to be difficult(Why doesn't she escape during the night? Why does she stay near the road?), a duplicitous postman should come to her as no surprise.

Late in the film, Xumei becomes a schoolteacher herself; she oversees a group of young boys in her home. If "Mang Shan" truly sided with the concept of a free China, and free women, the film would have Xumei teaching these future men something a little more useful than mathematics.

Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) has just graduated in college and can not find a job position. She meets a girl that introduces her to Manager Wu and she is hired to sell medicine herbs in a village in a remote mountain. Bai drinks a glass of water and when she awakes, she leans that she her documents have been stolen and she had been sold as a wife to Huang Degui, the son of a peasant family. Bai Xuemei tries to escape and she is raped and brutally beaten by Degui. She befriends Degui's cousin and local teacher Decheng that promises to help her to escape, but after having sex with her, Decheng is expelled from the village and leaves Bai Xuemei alone. She finds sympathy with two other women that have been also kidnapped a couple of years before and she starts giving classes to children. She unsuccessfully attempts to send letters to her family but the postman delivers all her letters to Degui. Bai Xuemei prostitutes with the local grocer and gets some money. When one of her student offers to send the letter to her, sooner her father appears in the village with two policemen to rescue Bai Xuemei. But the location is in a remote area and she is not secure yet.

"Mang Shan" is the story of a young Chinese woman that is lured, abducted and sold to be the wife of a man in an unbelievable society in the end of the Twentieth Century. It is well-known that in China, the families are allowed to have only one child per family and in many areas, female babies are drowned since the baby boy is more valuable to their primitive families. However, I am stunned with the ignorance of this corrupt society, where everyone everywhere needs to bribe to get the services, even medical assistance. Based on the IMDb credits, it seems that only the awesome Huang Lu is a professional actress and the cast is composed by mountain villagers, making the film even more realistic. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Montanha Cega" ("Blind Mountain")

I watched this movie at Hawaii International Film Festival and one of the best movies I have seen this year. The story is about a naive young girl who was abducted and "sold" to a mountaineer village as bride and her struggle to escape. The village is located deep in the mountains, remote and isolated and like many such villages in china in reality, has been this way for thousands of years. The script is based on real stories (I remember reading about reports on such stories in the early 90's in China), and the movie is extremely realistic in its depiction of the village, the characters and the logics of its dramatic development. Like another commentator said, the movie depicts the oppression of women in China, mainly the remote parts of rural China. However, it is far-fetched to quickly infer that the Chinese government is also complicit with the crime. Women have been sold into households as breeding tools and slaves for thousands of years in China. In urban areas, because of the Chinese revolution and Westernization in recent years, the status of women has been dramatically improved. However, in the remote rural areas, the feudal traditions and values still persist. The tragedy of the movie is, in the end of movie, despite the police efforts, nothing - not the strong-wills of the main character, not the institutional/legal system of the establishment - was able to triumph over the out-dated rotten tradition.

This was just not as good as Blind Shaft. It was too much of the same thing, but without interesting characters and good dialogue. The preliminary situation was very rushed, making it kind of silly, and I didn't really understand what was going on, except that the dialogue was seeming a bit cheesy.... The cinematography was very good and real, and the overall situation was disturbing and interesting, but it dragged on, and in the end it just did not pay off. There was no resolution like there was in Blind Shaft. Here it just sort of ended, without the situation really being solved in any way. It was frustrating. There were also a number of shots that just seemed pointless, like a shot of the main character looking off into the distance for about a minute, then a cutaway... Okay? I get that she's thinking about stuff but I don't really want to spend my time watching her contemplate. Shots like that and one of the old lady doing the loom over and over just got annoying. I think they were supposed to express a feeling of hopelessness or something along those lines but really it just got frustrating having the plot not advance at all. Basically there is no story here, it's just , "Wouldn't it be terrible if you were kidnapped and sold to a small Chinese farm community that wouldn't let you go?" Yes, yes it would. But that's really all there is to this movie. It's an "isn't this a terrible situation to be in?" kind of thing and it drags on and on with no resolution at the end. I feel a documentary on the subject of human trafficking would be more fitting to the subject.

Bai Xuemei, recently graduated from college, is unwittingly sold, not by her family but by her friends, to a villager deep in the bowels of mountainous rural China ... in the 1990s! This is not a documentary. It's more a typical horror film pacing through the suffocating psychological terror of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre without any blood, only psychological and physical abuse, including rape—father and mother hold her down while her purchaser rapes her. Ouch!

China is a vast expanse and this film's cinematography captures that space wonderfully. Bai Xuemei is so far up in the mountains it is simply too far to run to safety.

Lu Huang who plays Bai Xuemei is the only professional actor in the film. The rest of the cast, from the shopkeeper to the Village Chief, are actual villagers. When the police arrive to make a rescue and the whole village gangs up on them demanding the girl repay the 7,000 they paid for her if she is to return home, it rings with a frightening authenticity. I watched this film feeling that with 5 minutes left to go she would be rescued despite everything suggesting otherwise.

It's not that kind of film. Blind Mountain is an essay on the collision of traditional and contemporary culture. It's not pedantic, nor is it belittling to the realities of the culture at its source, but it's hard not to see it that way, especially through twentieth-century, western eyes. The film does a remarkable job of showing that it's not a matter of simply enforcing contemporary law. It's much deeper and difficult than that.

'Mang Shan', or as it is being distributed outside mainland China as 'Blind Mountain', is a tale of a barbaric practice that is still going on in China, as well as other parts of Asia:the kidnapping of young women & being sold as prospective brides,under the guise that they are being taken to a new job. This is the story of one young college educated woman who is taken to the far north of China,drugged, and abandoned to the mercy (or lack of)of a much older man. What follows is truly difficult to watch at times. Despite several attempts to escape, she is brought back to the farm where she tends to the pigs, as well as other chores. The local Mayor is no help,as is the postman, who gives her letters home back to her no good bastard of a husband. Word is that this film,although not outright banned by the Chinese government (big surprise in itself),was subject to some heavy cuts,as to render it viewable to the Chinese public (kind of like what happened to Ang Lee's 'Lust,Caution'). This is a difficult,but very well written, directed & acted out film of perseverance. Apparently,most of the cast are non professional,giving this grim film an even more realistic feel. Due to it's spotty distribution in the U.S.,finding a screening may be a hike, but is well worth it.

Unlike the strictly crass and oh-so-safe commercial film-making done here in the West, foreign filmmakers very often step up and put themselves on the line. It's to be envied. (Not emulated- not HERE- but certainly to be envied...) (Just for the record: with the exception of a couple of documentaries, there hasn't been anything done TO DATE about the disaster in New Orleans; no drama, nothing. How's THAT for feckless film-making...?) Having once tried to rescue a woman from a situation not unlike the one presented in BLIND MOUNTAIN, I can say without fear of contradiction that these situations exist even in THIS country and that the reasons are too many to enumerate. BLIND MOUNTAIN rings true, unfortunately. It's worth a nice long look.

I was rather unwillingly dragged to see this at a screening last night by an acquaintance. From what I'd read the film really didn't appeal but since I could see no way of getting out of it, I settled down to make the best of a bad draw and/or see what i could snaffle in the way of freebies.

I'm very glad I stayed, the film was excellent. It tells the story of an educated urban young woman who accepts a job to help pay for her studies by selling medical supplies in the hinterland. The usual plot Mugffin happens and the rest of the film details her relationships with her captors, the villagers and her attempts to escape. A pedestrian plot outline you may say, but it was acted with verve, in particular, Huang Lu as the protagonist was utterly convincing and all in all a well spent hour or two.

Few freebies, alas but I had an excellent meal afterward which made up for most of that.

Blind Mountain

"Blind Mountain" is a Chinese film with realistic characteristics. It is acted by Lu He, and directed by Yang Li. The film tells a story in the form of documentary. In the film, a young university student is abducted by human trafficker and sold to a rural countryside with little legal knowledge as wife. She is trapped in the countryside for years until rescued by police. The film is based on the true story. Unlike other commercial films, "Blind Mountain" adopted unconventional measures. Firstly, actors of this film are not professional actors buy ordinary from public. The director of this film is trying to illustrate an atmosphere in a more natural form, which makes the scenes more real and close to life. Thanks to actions of unprofessional actors, scenes of the film are presented more vividly. Actors are able to interpret their roles by their own understanding. One of actors has real-life experience of being abducted and trafficked. Such experience is lacked in other films. The scenes presented in this film are set to the background of Chinese countryside. In Chinese countryside, life in poverty tends to promote peasants to break laws for their own good. Because of the tradition with the typical rural Chinese families, family tradition is regarded to overpower laws. The director films this story in the real rural Chinese village in order to construct the atmosphere of such tradition. The film tends a dark art style; warm color tone is not found anywhere in the film. Such art style makes the audiences feel miserable life experience of main character, and gives a visual impact of depression. The effect is achieved especially when the girl is trafficked to the rural village while nobody helps her. She later understands that she is isolated because the whole village shield each other for human trafficking. Audiences can feel overwhelmingly suffocated, because the hope will almost never been expected in the film. The dark style color tone of the film strengthens such feeling. Such technique convinces the audiences that they are watch a dark story. Even in a sunny day, the director treats the scenes as it is overcast. The film does not come with background music as supplement, although it is able to heighten the atmosphere with plots and scenes. This is another unique characteristic this film carries. Audiences are only able to hear the true noise from the background, and the scripts are the actual focus. The film does not try to achieve resonance of audience by music. The only channel of knowing the plot of the film is conversations among actors. Since there is no background music, the simple conversations rather bring audiences impact and sense of reality. In China, we will hear new about abduction of women and infants from everyday newspapers and TV news. However, we have no way to understand what abducted women and babies have experienced. This film tells an ugly truth that even exists in today's China society. In the film, the word 'blind' in "Blind Mountain" includes a lot of meanings. The literal meaning of 'blind' is unable to see. However, in the film it represents the life of isolation, illiteracy, and under-civilizations in Chinese rural countryside. 'Blind' also represents the desperation and hopelessness inside the main character's heart. There is no hope, there is no help. Nobody will ever communicate with her, and she is trapped in an isolated mountainous village. The film tries to unveil village residents' lack of heart and humanity. The end of the film also brings great impact to audiences that the main character has to give up her own daughter to escape from the village. The film finally gives an impression of abducted women's miserable life that even escaped from the village; they have to suffer from the separation from who they love. (Because of the Chinese censorship, the film comes with two different endings. This essay only elaborates the ending of the version that is publicly shown in China.) "Blind Mountain" is not a commercial film. However, it brings even more impacts comparing with other commercial films. The reason is that the director chooses a story that is difficulty to believe, and uses a more realistic way to tell the audiences an inconvenient truth. "Blind Mountain" vividly illustrates image of the bottom side of Chinese society. Overall, it is a successful film.