Description

Over a million people are being relocated from the proposed flood basin of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, now under construction. At least one peasant woman dared to refuse to move. Director Feng Yan follows ten years in the life of Zhang Bingai, a woman like millions of Chinese farmers, who doggedly struggles with her fate and patiently tests her luck, all the while caught in the throes of the times.

“It’s the Chinese state bureaucracy vs. a strong-willed female farmer, and the result is an uneasy standoff in Feng Yan’s beautifully observed doc, “Bingai.” A worthy addition to the Mainland’s astonishing onrush of nonfiction films that take measure of the human scale in Chinese life, pic is a 10-years-in-the-making labor of love that contains telling details about what it’s like for subsistence farmers to function under stifling governmental controls. Fests far and wide will find this a strong aud title.”
–Robert Koehler, Variety