Mountains May Depart

(Shan he gu ren, Jia Zhangke, China/Japan/France 2015, 131 min., DCP, Chinese/Cantonese/Mandarin/English w/subtitles)

Rochester Premiere. Continuing to explore social and cultural devastation in the wake of China’s economic boom, Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke’s latest film is at once a grand-scale cultural examination and an intimate account of one woman through three stages of her life. Looking to the recent past, the present and the near-future, Shen Tao's pragmatic, economically influenced, decisions forge a path that ultimately leads to cultural loss and generational disconnect in exchange for Western wealth and lifestyle. Considering both the personal implications of this loss and the long ranging damage to Chinese culture, Mountains May Depart is an important and alarming signal of an impending cultural crisis in a globalized economy.

“Few filmmakers working today look as deeply at the changing world as Jia Zhangke does, or make the human stakes as vivid.” – New York Times