SYNOPSICS
Mang shan (2007) is a Mandarin movie. Yang Li has directed this movie. Lu Huang,Youan Yang,Yuling Zhang,Yunle He are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2007. Mang shan (2007) is considered one of the best Crime,Drama movie in India and around the world.
China, the 1990s. In villages where female babies are drowned, there are few young women to marry the men and bear more sons. Families buy wives - girls lured from the city. Bai finishes college and accepts a job in a remote mountain village harvesting herbs. It's a ruse: she's sold to a peasant family. She's indignant; the parents hold her so the son can rape her. She tries to run away; she's beaten. Other women kidnapped a few years before, now with children, tell her to comply. She continues to try to escape. She writes to her father, smuggling letters to the mailman. She obtains a bit of money. The village is without pity, except for the teacher. Can he help her? Anger mounts.
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Mang shan (2007) Reviews
A young woman is sold as a bride to a remote villager in China.
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.
Excellent film with some stark realities
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.
Unbelievable Society in the End of the Twentieth Century
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")
Excellent Film
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.
uncompromising depiction of suppression of women
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.