It's a harsh portrait of a brutal segment of society, only relieved by an occasional handsome landscape shot (filmed in the Shaanxi province) that makes Bai's plight all the more compelling.

[Director] Li was a documentarian before he switched to feature films with the highly praised 2003 feature Blind Shaft, and it shows in his raw style.

This is a resolutely tough-minded, beautifully crafted film so compelling as to make bearable watching the nearly unbearable.

With its complex (and, at times, deeply problematic) intersection of an educated outsider with the stubborn realities of rural life, Blind Mountain explicitly harkens back to those classic works from the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, like Yellow