Behemoth

Apocalyptic landscapes that at first glance look like scenes from another planet turn out to be the entrance to a gigantic iron mine stretching far into the ground. Down in the noisy and soot-black depths the raw materials are mined and subsequently driven away to a mill and melted down to cables in a heavy-industrial circuit of almost mythical proportions. Any notion of eternity, however, is punctured by the visionary filmmaker Zhao Liang, who through a subtle use of mirrors and prisms (and well-placed quotes by Dante) undermines the sublime subjects in an elegiac defence of the people who toil their way out of the mines. 'The fruit of our suffering is borne away to build the paradise of our dreams', in this case the deserted ghost towns of which there are several hundred in China, and which have cost hundreds of thousands of workers' lives and the health of several millions.