Behemoth

Filmmaker Zhao Liang's non-narrative documentary-exposé on the environmental/spiritual devastation wrought by China's rapid industrial progress is supposedly partially inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. Striking footage depicts hellish moonscapes and rapacious underground coal-mining operations in Mongolia, with verdant green hillsides and grazing cattle seen side-by-side with miles of spreading, lifeless, rubble-strewn waste. The peasant workers and miners purportedly benefit from all this, but instead die from lung disorders, and the final act presents an ironic vision of Dante's “paradise” in terms of the gleaming, almost entirely empty “ghost cities” that are built in the Chinese hinterlands—high-rise boomtowns for the new civilian prosperity that never happened. The subtitled poetry-narration is a bit esoteric, and viewers new to the subject may wish to know more about the haunting images than the sparse information that Zhao provides. Still, this is an eloquent visual commentary on the cost of China's economic “miracle.” Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)