One of the most compelling films that played Telluride this year (and hopefully will be coming soon to a film fest near you) was Blind Mountain, directed by Li Yang, whose 2003 film Blind Shaft won awards at fests from Berlin to Tribeca and points in between. Blind Shaft told the tale of two Chinese illegal coal mine workers who plan an extortion scam to kill a co-worker they claim is a relative and make it look like an accident, getting themselves, as the "family" of the victim, paid off to avoid publicity for the illegal mining operation. In Blind Mountain, which played at Cannes earlier this year before heading to Telluride, Li examines a different marginalized community and illegal activity in China: the selling of young women as wives in remote regions of the country. As in Blind Shaft, Li presents the community to which he turns his lens as a unique social microcosm with its own set of rules and mores.

Nearly thirty years of the one-child policy in China has resulted in countless female fetuses being aborted and female babies abandoned for adoption or even murdered, as couples sought to have the more "desirable" male infants. Now the repercussions of this policy are becoming more clear, as women of marrying age are in short supply, making women a commodity. Blind Mountain tells the tale of Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu), who has traveled to a remote community for a job with a medicine supply company. The recent college graduate has had trouble finding a job and wants desperately to pay off the debt her parents incurred for her education, and to help ensure her younger brother is able to stay in school. She travels to the distant countryside in the company of her boss and his assistant, believing she is there to procure medicinal herbs from remote farms.

She falls asleep, and wakes up imprisoned in one of the houses. She soon learns she has been sold as a bride to the son of the family on whose farm she is imprisoned. Her ID and all her personal possessions are gone. She appeals for help to the town supervisor, who asks her where her ID is, and tells her that her "family" arranged the marriage and accepted the dowry; when she tells him the people she was with were not her family, he promises to look into the matter, in a dismissive way that tells her she'll find no quarter there. In short order she has been forcibly married off to the son of the farmer, Huang Degui (Yang Youan), who forcibly consumates the marriage with his parents holding his bride down.

Xuemei's situation is bleak. There are other kidnapped brides living in the village, and they all advise her to give up hope of escaping and try to adapt. There are no phones, no police force, no help at all in this remotely situated village, and the villagers, when Xuemei attempts to escape, band together to help her husband capture her, and then urge him to beat her into submission. Xuemei's new husband is a dullard of a farmer, and his family has no mindset for dealing with this willful, educated girl who insists upon reading books. Xuemei finds friendship -- and the possibility of help -- with her husband's cousin, Decheng (He Yunle), the town teacher, who is the only college-educated person besides herself in the village. But no matter which way she turns, she finds herself trapped, until she's pushed at last to a final act of desperation. Everyone around her is concerned only with money (when she slits her wrists, the doctors won't treat her until her husband's family hands over cash) and their peculiar notion that, since Huang Degui paid for her to be his wife, he is in the right and Xuemei has no rights.

Blind Mountain is intensely paced throughout, drawing the viewer into Xuemei's plight. Every time she tries to escape and is caught again, the tension increases like a snare noose -- the more she struggles, the tighter the trap around her closes. The more indifference and nonchalant those around Xuemei are to the utter wrongness of the situation, the more tense I felt while watching the film. This isn't a film that makes broad, dramatic strokes with lots of wicked-cool action sequences to keep you engaged; if you don't empathize with Xuemei's situation, or if you're not particularly interested in films that address social issues obliquely, the pace of the film and the surface uniformity of the characters may not hold your attention. If you are able to project yourself into the story, though, the film is almost as tense as a psychological thriller.

What would it be like to wake up and find yourself trapped in this situation? Would you keep fighting, or give up as most of the other kidnapped brides in the village have? In our technologically savvy lives, the idea of being caught in a situation with no way to reach help, and where all the locals, even the police, believe your captors and not you, is almost unfathomable -- and that's what makes the film's subtle tension work so well. Imagine that you are a woman, and a group of men grab you off a bus in a public place in America -- a shopping mall parking lot, say, and you fight and scream for help as they drag you off the bus and into their waiting truck and everyone just sits there and watches, not wanting to interfere in a "family matter." That even the police, who come over to see what's happening, refuse to listen to you when the men abducting you say you're crazy, and just tell them to take you to the hospital. Consider that happening in America, even in a rural town -- the incongruity of the situation simply defies all logic and reason, and that's what makes Blind Mountain so quietly intense.

China's one-child policy (which was initially supposed to be a temporary plan to control overpopulation, but has since been extended for over 20 years, and the current plan by the Chinese government is to leave it in place at least through 2010. Blind Mountain addresses the one-child policy only peripherally through the Xuemei's story (a drowned baby girl, and the side comment that "no one would drown a boy" are really all that needs to be said), but it puts a social issue taking place on the other side of the globe in front of Western audiences through a film good enough to catch and hold their attention. Look for Blind Mountain to continue to play the fest circuit; we'll keep an eye out for word on the film getting a theatrical release, as well.