Restoring the Light

Even as China charges ahead as the world's second-largest economy, 60 percent of its people continue to live in the countryside. Filmmaker Carol Liu's documentary explores the hardships endured by rural residents, including inadequate healthcare. Liu follows Dr. Zhang Xubin, an ophthalmologist who practices amid the terraced fields of China's remote, impoverished Ningxia province, a man so dedicated that he has twice sold his house to finance his clinic in Yinchuan City. In Ningxia, where until recently many people dwelt in caves hacked out of cliffs, peasants suffer from untreated, debilitating conditions for years—even lifetimes. One young woman dreams of attending art school despite a chronic, crippling, and apparently untreatable infection in the bones of her foot, while her grandmother cannot work in the fields because of cataracts. Another family struggles to raise a 10-year-old boy who is also blind from cataracts, and his sister, who has epilepsy. This un-narrated film leaves many questions unanswered (What is China's healthcare policy? Why are rural people so poorly served?), but it does offer an illuminating portrait of Chinese provincial life. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Gardner)