Mountains May Depart

“Jia is modern cinema’s greatest poet of drift and the uncanny, slow-motion feeling of massive and inexorable change.”—New York Film Festival

A new film from Jia Zhangke is always an event. Mountains May Depart sees him working on his most ambitious scale yet in this penetrating dissection of modern China that takes place over two continents and three time periods. A young woman (played by Jia’s muse Zhao Tao) chooses to marry a wealthy capitalist over a coal miner, leading to a broken family’s quest for a success that remains heartbreakingly out of reach. The result is a prescient and moving tale that sees an important filmmaker pushing himself—and cinema—into new realms of storytelling and critique. (125 mins., DCP)