Behemoth

One of China's most fearlessly outspoken documentary makers, Zhao Liang, tackles the impact of the economic leap forward in this magisterial and deeply disconcerting odyssey. Taking his cue from Dante's Divine Comedy, Zhao follows a coal miner with a mirror on his back on a trek through Inner Mongolia. He pauses to examine the scars that mining has left on the landscape before watching fellow miners and foundry workers toiling in hellish conditions for pittance wages and the prospect of pneumoconiosis. Occasionally pausing to curl naked on the steppe, the miner spies on scavengers stealing from slag heaps before drifting through the pristine streets of a city that was abandoned without ever being occupied. Serving as his own narrator and cinematographer, Zhao casts a poetic pall over the soul-destroying industrial wilderness. His fury simmers beneath the seemingly detached images, as he exposes the exploitation, spoliation and waste underpinning the Communist regime's hypocritical policies.