Montanha Cega

This is an extremely compelling and thought provoking film.

It portrays the fate of a young woman who accepts a job offer in the countryside and finds she has been sold as a bride to a family in a remote village in modern day China.

It is extremely realistic, my uninformed guess is that there were very few professional actors involved. All the characters seemed completely true to life.

Village life in modern China is very accurately portrayed. The Chinese government is vigorously trying to stop the old cultural practice of young women being sold as brides but traditions sometimes die hard; especially in areas remote from centers of authority.

Most interestingly the film revealed how Chinese people relate to authority. The villagers' reactions to visits from party officials and the police were right on the mark.

I watched this with a woman who grew up in in a small village and she confirmed its unerring accuracy.

There are many wonderful improvements in the life of most Chinese people. This film doesn't negate them; but shines a light on one facet that is heartbreaking in its injustice.

Make sure you catch this classic.

Blind Mountain is an excellent film about a college girl being duped into going into a mountain village and left there "sold" as a bride and her attempts to escape and get back to her family. The plot sounds trite but Yang Li's excellent direction and the crisp editing along with superb performances in the main roles, make this into a twisting horror story and the viewer knows not, where the plot is going.

Apart from the main role of Bai and the teacher, all other actors were actual mountain village people which is startling in the uncompromising look at their culture and the hard lives ingrained into their faces, there are also some real, now rescued, "brides" playing themselves in the film.

Although the film as a good social point to make, it's not preaching or forcing the issues on you but rather asking you to examine the situation. To the villagers, this is just life and it's always been this way, to observers they seem inhumane. Although the film obviously brings up the issue of the one child policy, these villages and bride trafficking have been going one since long before that policy was put into affect and still does in many parts of the world, not just China.

Yang Li was in the audience and took questions at the Hawaii International Film Festival. It was annoying to see the Q&A get hijacked a little by feminists wanting to make a point and answering their own questions but other than that the director was frank and forthcoming about his film.

Excellent. Recommended.

I was able to see this movie at the Portland International Film Festival. I'm a huge fan of Asian cinema, particularly Japanese and Korean films. Before this, I had seen very little from the Chinese, and i must say this is a great introduction to China's promising film-making talent. Not one scene of this movie bored me, as i thought it certainly would. The majority of the movie follows the main characters imprisonment in the isolated village, and her numerous attempts to escape until the final, abrupt yet amazing, ending. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who enjoys great cinema, and i personally can't wait until i get my hands on this movie. Ironically, i saw this with my girlfriend on valentine's day. Talk about silly.

I heard about the movie from Leonard(a youtuber) when something happened in Harvest County(I don't dare to tell the name so I translated it), which shares the same event as the plots here.

However the movie is banned in China because it has torn the fig leaf of the dark side.

In the early 90s, a young woman, Bai Xuemei, a recent college graduate, travels to the countryside of rural Shaanxi province believing she is going to start a job selling medicine to rural peasants. After arriving at remote village, she is drugged and awakes to discover her identity papers have been taken and she is the prisoner of her new 'husband', a contemptuous, uneducated peasant who has bought her for 7000 yuan. Bai protests and tries to leave but is forcibly restrained by her new 'family'. In fact, her new husband's parents assist him in restraining her so that she can be raped. Eventually Bai manages to escape her confinement and flees to inform the local police and is brought to the village chief. He, however, won't help her without proof (identity papers) or a refund of the 7000 yuan and returns her to custody of her would-be-husband. Later Bai meets other prisoner wives who share her fate but have long given up their will to escape. Horrified, as the seriousness of her predicament sinks in, she makes more desperate attempts to escape.

Incredibly enough, the film is based on the real stories of women who were enslaved this way in rural China - the demand for wives brought about by the imbalance of male and female children in the countryside. For once an idyllic, isolated rural Chinese village is portrayed as a place of ignorance and malevolence and a place to escape from. Amazing acting from the cast of non-actors who play themselves very convincingly. The only disappointment might be Bai herself who, as a college graduate, doesn't seem to plan her escape attempts very well.