Blind Mountain

Having travelled to a remote part of Northern China to pursue employment, young female student Bai Xuemei is drugged by human traffickers and wakes up to find that she’s been sold as a wife to one of the locals. Depicting with unflinching horror Bai’s imprisonment – she’s kept in a one-room shack where she is beaten and raped – “Blind Mountain” is a thrilling, masterfully controlled account of one prisoner’s protracted attempt to escape from a whole community of jailers. Playing like a Chinese update on Deliverance, this is a savage, brilliantly tense commentary on the uneasy relationship between modern China and its rural backwaters. Handled with lean, discreet precision by director Li Yang, “Blind Mountain” grips with rare intensity.